Greener Gadgets Design Competition Winners on line! We are proud to publish the entire gallery of Greener Gadgets winners and notables. Check out the site, featuring over 70 entries from around the world, all offering innovative solutions, gestures, and provocations toward positive change.
Thank you to everyone who entered, congratulations to the winners and notables, and say goodbye to the next hour of your life. There's some serious good design in here.
>>Enter the Greener Gadgets Results Site<<
How it went down: There were two rounds of pre-judging prior to the Greener Gadgets Conference in NYC, and concluding a marathon day at the conference, Allan Chochinov of Core77 took to the stage along with panelist/judges Ryan Block from Engadget, Valerie Casey of The Designers Accord and IDEO, and Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabit (and Greener Gadgets). Following a whirlwind tour of dozens of notable entries, the panel discussed their top ten, then turned the final vote over the audience in true clap-o-meter style, who's first place choice might have signaled a slight backlash against gadgets--after a whole day of 'em. (You can check out the proceedings in this video.)
And here are the winners!:
First Prize
EnerJar, designed by Matt Meshulam and Zach Dwiel
Second Prize
Gravia, designed by Clay Moulton
Third Prize
Green Cell, designed by Theo Richardson
And a special bonus forth place (prize will be a Voltaic Systems solar charging backpack):
RollOn, designed by Christian Karlsson
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Interaction '08 Conference converage! Core was on the floor of this past weekend's IxDA conference in Savannah, Georgia, with stand-out presentations and a sell-out crowd. Check out all our coverage right here.
Design firm culture: how to foster innovation? "Hire naive misfits who argue with you; encourage failure; avoid letting client input limit your vision; and fully commit to risky ventures." It sounds like crappy advice for someone running a design firm, but these are tactics proposed by Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, in an article titled "Creating a firm culture that supports innovative design."
Cultivating an environment in which there is a swift and easy exchange of ideas is an important part of the design process in many firms, both large and small. What may not be so obvious are strategies to foster optimal functioning and creative thinking in such an environment.
(Incidentally Sutton's also got a great article/blog entry, co-written with Guy Kawasaki, called "Is Your Future Boss an Asshole?")
Interaction Design and ID: You're already doing it...don't you want to know what it's all about? By David Malouf. Fresh off the IxDA Conference in Savannah, David Malouf offers an analysis of the differences and similarities between Industrial Designers and Interaction Designers, how they can learn from each other, and how IDers can bolster their knowledge--and know how--in a world of increasingly complex products. Here's the start:
Today, more and more industrial designers are being asked to design products and systems that incorporate interactive components. And since the level of complexity increases exponentially as a product gains more digital intelligence, a new kind of expertise is needed.Further, if we look at the classical foundational elements of industrial design, there is almost no reference to anything dealing with behavior--color, texture, shape, volume, space, and line remain the primary "building blocks" of a formal industrial design education. Beyond this foundation, ID as a historical design discipline has until very recently concentrated more on the balance of function and form only as they relate to visceral, visual aesthetics. But lately, "product design" education has steered industrial design programs to consider "context of use" as a core data set in guiding function and form. Even these programs tend to concentrate more on research methodologies for gaining further insights into user contexts, however, than in teaching the unique design foundations associated with interaction.
You're damned if you do (paper) and damned if you don't (plastic). How do you answer that age old question, "Paper or Plastic?" It's not an easy one to conclude upon, but the Washington Post's got some fun factoids on production, pollution, recycling and biodegradability to help you decide.
Anyhoos, how about neither?
via swissmiss
How Bauhaus was shaped into greatness. Alice Rawthorn tells a short version of the story of the Bauhaus in the International Herald Tribune. Well worth the read, here's a snippet:
There have been other great design schools, but none that matched the Bauhaus. Many of the most influential designers of the 20th century taught or studied there. Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in architecture. Marcel Breuer in furniture. Bayer in graphics. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in film. Oskar Schlemmer in theater design. Anni Albers and Gunta Stolzl in textiles. Marianne Brandt and Wilhelm Wagenfeld in product design. The list goes on. Working alongside them were great artists like Paul Klee, Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky. Even today, some 75 years after the Bauhaus closed, our lives wouldn't be the same without it.The story of the Bauhaus, from 1919 when Gropius became director, to 1933, when Mies reluctantly disbanded it, is told in an exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in England. How did one design school become so influential? Like most success stories, it was (almost) as much about luck as judgment, but behind its minimally elegant facade, the Bauhaus was a turbulent place, and very vulnerable to the political pressures of Nazi Germany. For much of the time, it was, as Anni Albers put it when she arrived in 1922, "a great muddle."
We've found the 8th continent...and it isn't pretty. It's not exactly a Leif-Ericson-class discovery in terms of positivity, but it's important nonetheless. Oceanographer Charles Moore was on the high seas between Hawaii and the US mainland when he drifted into the "'North Pacific gyre'--a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it. What he found was revolting:
He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"
This "garbage continent" is apparently twice the size of the US landmass, and was formed from garbage both shipborne and dumped from land. Even worse, it's more malevolent than just a bunch of floating rubbish--it's decomposing into a kind of toxic soup, and it's due to double in size over the next decade. Read the unbelievable tale here.
via the independent
Tech logos from past to present. Check out the evolutions of the biggest tech companies' logos from decorative to retro to too 2.0.
thanks bryman!
Post-It typeface. The Post-It is the message. This Post-It typeface is by Sanda Zahirovic, a student Kingston University in London.
via swissmiss
And finally, The Smoking Gun. Kablam! Literally. The Smoking Gun. Ain't it the truth...new from Design Glut.
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