This year’s People’s Design Award winner went to Zōn Hearing Aid, designed by Stuart Karten Design.
After thousands of votes were cast during the course of one month on Cooper-Hewitt’s website, Zon, a hearing aid developed by the Los Angeles-based industrial design consultancy Stuart Karten Design, emerged as the public’s favorite design.
Zon transforms the standard beige, shapeless hearing aid into a dynamic, sculptural object that ergonomically embraces the geometry of the ear while taking advantage of the latest technology to provide the highest audio quality.
The objective of the competition was to find new, fresh, alternative ideas and products to add to Isku’s furniture range for public premises and reception areas. Contestants were asked to design an interior solution and furniture for the lounge and reception areas of an international company. The illustrations
must cover the basic functions of a modern business reception, including waiting and greeting areas and IT facilities, together with the furniture for all these functions. The winners are as follows:
1st Prize: Nataliya Vishnyakova and Georgy Morozov HORIZON LINE -collection.
Stefan Buchberger, from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, has been chosen winner of the Electrolux Design Lab 2008 competition for inventing Flatshare. Flatshare is a modular fridge with individual compartments for people who live with several roommates.
Flatshare consists of a base station and up to four stackable modules. The modules allow each individual user to have his or her own refrigerator space and can be customized with various colorful skins as well as with add-ons like a bottle opener. Handles mounted on the side make it easy to transport the modules.
Reinventing the fridge
The jury was impressed by the ingenuity. “A fridge is a tricky thing to reinvent,” says Henrik Otto, head of Global Design for Electrolux and chair for the jury. “Flatshare, however, manages to be new in a fun and expressive way. A shared refrigerator is also very relevant from a consumer-insight perspective, managing to resolve the needs and wants of the target group.”
“This concept stood out, in color as well as design, and the fact that you could personalize your Flatshare modules added an interesting emotional value,” adds Yves Behar, award-wining Swiss designer and fellow juror.
2008“芙蓉杯”国际工业设计创新大赛
2008 Lotus Cup International Industrial Design Prize is a brand new international design prize that aims to encourage and celebrate all the innovative achievements of industrial design and the contributions of designers both inside and outside of the Hunan province, China.
Theme: ‘Innovation, Harmony and Value’.
Innovation – advocating innovative concept and inspire creative passion to lead the trend in innovation age. Harmony – creating sustainable design in conformity with “resources-effective and environment-friendly society”. Value – Focusing on user experience to boost products’ added-value and brand value.
Registration
To register, visit the even website and download the Entry Form from the event website. Submit your entry along with the digital copy of Entry Form by Email to: mail@lotusprize.com. You will receive a reply by the organising committee if your submission is successful.
Airbus is launching an international competition “Fly Your Ideas” for student teams worldwide to come up with innovative ideas to shape the future of aviation and help to enhance the sector’s eco-efficiency. The objective: creating more value with less impact on the environment.
The competition is open to college and university students from around the world, studying a degree, Masters or PhD in any academic discipline, from engineering to marketing, business to science and philosophy to design. The proposals can look at a wide range of topics including new materials, products and/or processes as well as aircraft performance, manufacturing and organisational and operational performance.
A top prize of €30,000 is offered to the team whose idea demonstrates the greatest potential for improvement. The teams will advance through different competitive and challenging rounds, concluding with a live final at the Le Bourget Airshow in June 2009.
For the past 5 years, Peugeot has held a design contest that gives young designers a chance to produce a concept for a large company. This new edition of the Design Contest has again shown the wonderful energy driving the designers of around 100 nationalities who have proposed more than 2500 designs.This year the theme was “imagine the Peugeot in the worldwide megalopolis of tomorrow,” and the winner has been chosen.
The SparkAwards are the new benchmark for design —encouraging new ways for all people to really experience design—and participate—and improve our world. It is a fresh, modern qualification system that recognizes new processes and technology and seeks to involve people and ideas from untapped sources. Below are some winning entries from this year:
Haptica Braille Watch
Designer: David Chavez
“Haptica is a moveable Braille timepiece that provides a quick and accurate time reading. The product is unique in providing a real-time readout in Braille which the reader scans along with their finger to check the time”
Grow Bike
Designer: Springtime
“Children need a lot of different vehicles in their first 4 years, creating a lot of cost and occupying a lot of space. The GrowBike is actually a set of parts that can be assembled into 4 different bike designs, step by step as your child grows.”
Dyson Airblade
Designer: James Dyson
“Whilst developing air knives for a different project, Dyson found that the force of air created by its Dyson Digital Motor (DDM) would scrape water from hands, leaving them completely dry. The company has gone on to build the fastest, most hygienic hand dryer on the market.”
Vite – Rescue Stretcher
Designers: Kim, Lin & Zea
“A collapsible stretcher designed to rescue the injured patient as fast as possible in the snow. The backpack shell works as a sled, allowing a patient to be carried by one person. Other products on the market are designed to be used by two people. The Vite can be be easily opened in order to minimize the time spent setting up the sled for an injured patient.”
Moen Cascata
Designer: Essential Design
“A bathroom faucet that “pours” by tipping the spout like one would tip a pitcher of water. It’s an attempt to recover some of the natural flowing behavior of water and reconnect people with the aesthetic qualities and personal meaning associated with water and cleansing.”
A 3D curve sketching system that captures some of the affordances of pen and paper for professional designers, allowing them to iterate directly on concept 3D curve models. The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary. The system was designed by Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan, and Karan Singh. For more information, please refer to http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~shbae/ilovesketch.htm
NeuroSky has created a wearable biosensor allowing users to control electronic devices with their minds. A red wire feeds brainwaves into a patented device that turns them into commands. The device uses a series of emotion-based algorithms to allow users to push and pull objects (virtual or external) based on an attention or meditation rating. For example, users can levitate virtual objects with a strong meditation rating, or push/pull objects with a strong attention rating.
Their technology allows users to control just about any mechanical system. They plan to expand into brainwave-read robots for the elderly and disabled in the future, as well as diversify their command suite to include more emotions and subtle movements such as eye blinks. For more information, please http://www.neurosky.com/
Comments Off
Entries (RSS)