Postcards From Berlin: Fresh Photos From The DMY 2008 Design Festival!

Last week, Berlin celebrated its yearly design event (formerly known as DESIGNMAI) now organized by the DMY organization who created a platform for creative things, talks, workshops and parties one of Europe's most creative cities.

A central exhibition at the Arena anchors a five-day DMY 2008 festival with over 150 designers showcasing their latest works. Some 36 ALLSTARS exhibitions are spread out all over town making sure that an inspiring tour along the city of Berlin is included.

What happened (and is still happening) this year? -- See more pics here!

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IDEA/Brasil Award 2008, São Paulo

Showcasing the best in contemporary Brazilian Design, The IDEA/Brasil Awards took place with an Oscar-like fanfare in São Paulo's Teatro Frei Caneca. Organized by Objeto Brasil in association with the Apex-Brasil, the award is endorsed by the IDSA and is the first time the International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) has been held outside of the United States.

53 Designers and Agencies were awarded prizes for work ranging across the full spectrum of consumer and commercial goods. Highlights included the 'Phenom 100' private jet from the Brazilian aircraft manufacture Embraer, the 'Super Bossa' pendant lamp by designer Fernando Prado, 'Max Door' by design agency No Design, the 'Ziplux' outdoor light-totem by Komlux, the awesome 'Stark 4WD Flex' off-road jeep by Questo Design and TAC, the 'Gear Cube for wheelchairs' reducing 50% the amount of energy expended by Ronem Perlin, and the playful 'Goma Stool' from designer Renata Moure.

In the next few days we'll be posting more detailed reports and interviews with some of the amazing Brazilian designers we've met in the last week, and for anyone lucky enough to be visiting São Paulo in the next 2 weeks, don't miss the finalists work on display at the IDEA/Brasil exhibition on the 7th Floor of the Teatro Shopping Frei Caneca.

Click here for more action from the opening party.

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New Gallery up at Core77: New York Design Week 2008

The pit-stop between Milan and Art Basel, New York Design Week 2008 (May 17-20) presented a hearty collection of the best the Design World has to offer.

>> view gallery

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We Don't Want To Make Things panel discussion from 02NYC

On Tuesday, June 10th at 7pm, Allan Chochinov will be moderating a discussion produced by 02NYC with an all-star panel: Wendy Brawer from Green Map System, Tamara Giltsoff from ozolab, David Reinfurt from Dexter Sinister, and Damon Rich from the Center for Urban Pedagogy. It will be at Cooper Union's Great Hall.

Here's the pitch:

Designers as a group exercise significant leverage to create cultural influence and catalyze social change, for better or for worse. Given our growing awareness of the ecological, political and social impact of unsustainable consumption, what responsibility (and what means) do designers have to change the course? Join us for an inter-disciplinary panel discussion about how designers are addressing the systemic challenges of ecological design.

Our focus is on non-product-oriented design processes--on rethinking and reframing our purposes. For example, thinking outside the (very important) box of greening the supply chain, in what ways can/does design enable people as producers of meaning, rather than of waste?

Ten bucks at the door and no RSVP. Hope to see you there. (Site)

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Coffee carrier for "common" customers

If you're stepping out to grab a coffee, decency requires you ask your co-workers if anyone else wants one. But on the way back to the office, you curse your own decency as you juggle multiple hot cups and the phone rings or you need to pull out your keys.

A nifty solution is this carry-bag for coffees, apparently from a chain. As the page showing the bag and the comments on it are in German, we were unable to get more info about it, but Google Translator did let us read some excellent comments like these:

So I find it great. This hole every day I think decaffeinated coffee with 0.1% milk. The will for me gepustet extra cold, so I opened my mouth or by not verbrenne get stomach pain. You are all so common :-(

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Solar Collector Performance

Should you happen to be in Ontario for the summer solstice this year (shouldn't we all?!), drop by the Solar Collector, a solar-powered, web-connected, interactive sculpture by Matt Gorbet, Rob Gorbet, and Susan Gorbet. The form is made up of shafts faced with solar panels that are oriented to reflect the angles of the sun through the changing seasons. During the day, the sculpture collects energy and at dusk the lights on the shafts come to life with graceful patterns that are created by the community via the web.

Join Gorbet Design on June 21st at 8:30pm, 100 Maple Grove Road, Cambridge, Ontario, to see the sculptures come to life.

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New iPhone is near, but Nokia's still the big dog

Here's an interesting statistic: While the iPhone is popular, Nokia "sells more phones every week than Apple has sold since the iPhone's introduction" (italics ours). Guess there's a difference between being popular and global.

The above statistic, from Charter Equity Research analyst Edward Snyder, was mentioned in a Times article on the upcoming iPhone launch, which has been widely forecast for June 9th. That's a little over a week away--or in Nokia terms, a few million phones.

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BluDot Dutch-Style

No more packing your student projects into storage! Blue. (pronounced BlueDot, but no relation to this BluDot) is a brilliant initiative that sells consumer products designed and made by Dutch students during their study at the Industrial Design department of Delft Technical University in the Netherlands. Products like Crispijn Westen's Salt and Pepper set and Goran Aleksijovski's Aluminate lamp are two examples of, yet again, a strong Dutch Design collective.

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Plastic bags and the environment: the young kid and the tall man all play their part

We designers can have a positive impact on the environment by spec'ing out green-friendly materials, but that's for products and stuff we're working on now. What about all the junk that's already been made? Chains like Whole Foods have switched from plastic bags to paper, but what about the plastic bags that have already gone into the wastestream at an estimated rate of 500 billion to 1 trillion a year?

Help is here, from an unexpected source: Canadian high school student Daniel Burd, who has reportedly discovered how to speed up the decomposition of plastic bags using a specific cocktail of bacteria. Left on their own, plastic bags can take centuries to decompose; with Burd's brew, it allegedly takes three months!

Also, here's a bizarre tale (with photos) that you'll swear is an urban myth:

A dolphin in a Chinese aquarium mistook a floating plastic bag for food and ate it. Obviously this could kill the dolphin, so surgery was performed to try to remove the bag. After the surgery failed, aquarium authorities then enlisted the help of the world's tallest man, 7'9" Bao Xishun, to reach his long arms into the dolphin's stomach to remove the plastic bag manually.

via dvice and no plastic bags

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P&G's forward-thinking CEO on innovation

In today's business climate, is it possible for rivals to collaborate even as they compete? Apparently so, according to a New York Times interview with Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley: though P&G and Clorox are competitors, P&G actually developed Clorox's Glad Press-and-Seal wrap.

"We set a goal, that half of the innovations we take to market should have external front-end partners," Lafley explains. "We'll accept innovation help from any source, even competitors.... So we compete like crazy with Clorox on cleaning products, but partner with them on wraps."

What we found most interesting is Lafley's forward-thinking view of product innovation:

Lafley: ...We have regular innovation reviews, where we move ideas and best practices around our 22 businesses.

Interviewer: And yet only half of your product innovations succeed. Why isn't the rate higher?

Lafley: I don't really want it to be. Human nature is such that, if we push our people to drive the batting average up, they'll try to hit more safely, take a shorter swing, go for the singles instead of home runs.

Lafley recently wrote The Game-Changer, a book on business innovation, with management consultant Ram Charan.

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Green product designs: cabinet composter, water filtration bottle

Two green innovations that almost seem too good to be true:

The NatureMill kitchen cabinet composter only draws 50 cents of power per month, but will allegedly turn your table scraps into compost in just two weeks, without attracting the insects and vermin that can plague urban applications of composting. It's hard to tell from the crappy product photos, but it's about the size of a paper shredder. Retails for around $300.

The Lifesaver water filtration bottle is designed for simplicity--you dunk it into dirty water to fill it, use the integrated pump to get the water through the filter, and can then drink the clean results. Takes under a minute to process and can be used for over five years. The catch? $460 retail!

via green home and inhabitat

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Inconvenient Truths + more from Alex Steffen

If you got a kick out of the current Wired Magazine's cover story on Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green, and wondered what the greener-types thought of it, well, the editors were good enough to give Alex Steffen a rebuttal right in the book itself.

Ah, but there's more. Here's Alex on yesterday's Worldchanging:

The discussions we see today -- whether we're talking energy sources, farming practices or fashion choices -- are not even the right kind of debate. Unable to mentally grapple with the idea that we need to be aiming for total sustainability right now, we talk to death the same series of inadequate baby steps. Faced with the need to reinvent the material basis of our civilization, we argue paper or plastic.

If you want truly dangerous bright green ideas, go way out beyond what the conventional wisdom thinks is possible. The conventional wisdom's sense of the possible is irrelevant to reality; it's being melted by climate change and planetary crisis faster than an Alpine glacier. Think, instead, of the implications of ideas like zero energy, zero emissions, zero waste, closed loops, true-cost accounting for the value of ecological services, product-service systems, visible flows, totally transparent backstories, open innovation, green infrastructure, etc. These concepts are really weird, full of new insights and critical uncertainties -- and they, or ideas like them, are very quickly going to become the operating principles of our entire society. If we want to avoid a catastrophic collision with ecological reality, we need to change our thinking.

Our ideas of what's normal, or even what's possible, will not outlast the next decade. Unfortunately, Wired's list of heresies is a list of normal, contemporary approaches (nukes, tree plantations, factory farming, living in the Sunbelt suburbs) and current environmental commonplaces (cities are good, China can be green, carbon trading needs reform) packaged in a way designed to shock and titillate.

What would have been far, far more heretical is to do for planetary sustainability issues what the first issues of Wired tried to do for information technologies: explain why the whole current debate was stale and out-of-touch, and attempt to illuminate a new way of thinking that to the folks back home seemed unfathomable, often crazy, but which turned out to be more right than wrong -- to predict the present in a way that changes our understanding of the world in which we live. There is an emerging culture of real, bright green hand-waving brilliant heretics out there, and the reading public deserves to know what they think.

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Mazda designs and processes, in-depth

It's a PR push for them, and a good look inside a car design studio for us--Mazda has recently flooded Car Body Design (main site here) with a slew of content:

- Design People takes a look at the people in front of the drawing boards.

- Nagare Design Language gives a comprehensive look at the design process of their Nagare concept.

- Design World discusses "design DNA," concept sketching, and follows the route from concept to production.

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New New Favorite Thing: Protomold's Demo Mold

And finally we still haven't gotten around to actually using their services, but Minneapolis-based rapid molding company Protomold has got the Coolest Promotional Shwag prize all wrapped up. First, they sent us the infamous purple cube, making sink marks, pass-core features and screw boss design a cinch to explain. Arriving in the mail last week, though, was something that tops even that: the Demo Mold. It's essentially a super-simplified injection molding tool, complete with runner, ejector pins, slide action, and enough annotation to make the exhaustive process of describing the problem with undercuts to your client/manager a thing of the past.

On top of all that, it's a nice thought-provoker: when tooling time and cost drops to the point where you can manufacture an object to do your explaining for you, what's next?

Free to the industry; click here to order one.

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