Now in it's fifth year, the London Design Museum's Designs of the Year exhibition presents a snapshot of industry heavyweights across seven categories including: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Product Design, and Transport. The show features 89 nominations, the winner for each category and overall winner for 2012 will be announced later this year in April.
There's some interesting statistics posted over at It's Nice That breaking down the type of entries that were nominated, "In the last five years, exactly one third of the nominations for Designs of the Year have been self-initiated, which is a sobering/inspiring thought depending on which way you choose to look at it".
Checkout our gallery for highlights from all the categories, and definitely make an effort to visit the museum's top floor if you find yourself in London before July.
There's an exciting new material on the block, and it's showing up in...luggage. Baggage manufacturer Tumi is now using Tegris, a polypropylene thermoplastic composite developed by textile and chemical giant Milliken, and is rolling it out in their new Tegra-Lite collection, starting with a carry-on.
So what is Tegris, and why is it better than, say, the polycarbonate used in Pelican cases? Here are the talking points we think will be of interest to product designers:
RKS, the California-based design consultancy, has recently launched their "Design in USA" brand certification mark to help, "enhance and broaden the 'Made In' labeling."
There is no doubt that American design is currently experiencing a renaissance of sorts—"From Apple to Zipcar, creative design is at the heart of entrepreneurial success in the USA," explains Bill Moggridge, Director, Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. As Ravi K. Sawhney, CEO of RKS explains, "Better branding our design community is one simple but powerful step to make our voice and value better known. I hope the creation and use of this brand will be a catalyst for a broader emergence of recognition, pride and optimism for the incredible things designers are creating every day in America because of our diversity, ingenuity and spirit."
In a time when the strength and value of American manufacturing has come to the forefront of public discussion, it is a curious move to shift the focus to the more opaque conversation of a product being designed in the United States. What are your thoughts for the brand certification? Do you have plans to use it for future products?
It's Friday and we are so ready to do some PLAYing over the weekend. To get you inspired, we've got this round's winners for the Core77 and Braun Design in the Wild photo challenge. Readers from around the world submitted every day objects of PLAY ranging from nostalgic toys from childhood to whimsical found landscapes. We loved that some PLAY-things are iconic no matter where you're from: ropes for tug-of-war, boardgames, legos and rubik's cubes. But most importantly, we recognized the joy and delight in everyday objects for play.
JURY WINNER
Let's Play a Tune! Paul Bennett, United States This is the Floyd-Rose style floating bridge on my Guitar. I love to play surf music and the floating bridge makes it a snap. Sometimes adjustments can be tricky but it is worth it in the end. The colored balls are the strings, each size string has a different color to help prevent them from getting mixed up during restring operations.
POPULAR WINNER
2,000 filaments Jennifer DiMase, United States The Koosh ball has always been a favorite toy of mine. Colorful, soft, tossable, lively. It's a delightfully simple concept: a ball composed of 2,000 natural rubber filaments.
Even though Renzo Piano's design for the new Whitney Museum in downtown New York City was unveiled in 2008, this is the first time we've been treated to a flying tour of the space. When it's completed in 2015, the Whitney's new location on Gansevoort Street at the southern entrance of the High Line will be the museum's fourth home. The first was in Greenwich Village when sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened the museum in 1931. In 1954 it moved to Midtown, a space it easily outgrew, and then, just a decade later it moved to the Marcel Breuer-designed space, where it still stands, on the Upper East Side.
Now the Whitney's permanent collection of over 19,000 works requires an even larger space. Their new video sweeps through Piano's 200,000-square foot museum that includes 13,000-square-feet for outdoor exhibitions as well as an 18,000-square-foot temporary gallery, "the largest column-free museum gallery in New York City." With the ever expanding High Line, the Whitney and all the smaller businesses that are sure to follow, Chelsea and the Meatpacking District can no longer be called an industrial wasteland, but a bustling cultural center. Watch the tour after the jump:
One year ago Corning, the upstate-New-York-based glass manufacturer, released a concept video called "A Day of Glass." The five-and-a-half-minute spot featured Microsoft-like depictions of a family living in a world where interface designers appear to have solved more problems than we knew we had, and the vision resounded with viewers (to the tune of 17.5 million YouTube hits and counting).
Now Corning's at it again with "A Day of Glass 2," below. Released almost exactly one year after the first vid, it continues to depict Corning's vision of "how highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world." Be sure to check out the medical stuff that starts happening around 4:03--how could would it be if you could do that with cross-sections of particularly troublesome parts of your product design?
While the cynics among us can't help but project the infrastructure and behind-the-scenes design required to make all of this stuff work--"Ah, I guess there's a server in the closet," "So that little rectangle is cloud-enabled," et cetera--it seems even tighter than the Microsoft vids.
Corning has also released a sort of "For Dummies" version of the vid where an on-screen narrator cuts in to explain the fanciful technologies that the characters are interacting with. Hit the jump to check it out.
Now in its third season, the arrival of the most recent Converse Loves Marimekko collaboration feels like the first signs of spring. We love seeing the bright and whimsical Finnish prints adorning the canvas of iconic Converse silhouettes.
The latest Converse Loves Marimekko collection features five signature Marimekko prints including Poppy in Navy and Yellow. The iconic Chuck Taylor All Star shoe is featured in the popular Unikko (meaning "poppy") and Lokki (meaning "seagull") prints design by Maija Isola and the Kameka print designed by Annika Rimala. The Jack Purcell Helen gets a boost of color in the Muija (meaning "woman"), Lokki (meaning "seagull"), and Appelsiini (meaning "orange") prints also designed by Maija Isola. See the collection after the jump!
How do you make people with no interest in design become aware of design in the first place? One approach taken by creative studio Perfect Fools is their Kauko Cafe pop-up installation for Helsinki, part of the World Design Capital 2012 list of events. The two-pronged concept behind the cafe is 1) to add a measure of user agency by enabling them to alter the heights of various surfaces, and 2) to populate the cafe with bad design, like sugar shakers and napkin holders that are intended to work poorly, as you'll see below:
I'm not crazy about the second part of the approach, drawing attention to design by making it annoying; I've never been a fan of, say, those uncomfortably-designed chairs that "force the user to recontextualize the concept of seating," et cetera. But I suppose there's no arguing with the efficacy. What do you think of the approach, and/or how would you have done it differently?
Reporting by Marc Thorpe. Images courtesy of Tokujin Yoshioka Studio.
Paris' semiannual design tradeshow honors the creative genius of designers across architectural interiors, furniture and product design through their design à vivre "Design of the Year" program. 2012's nominees the Campana Brothers, Hubert le Gall and Tokujin Yoshioka showcased their work through special installations at the fair.
We were particularly taken by Tokujin's exhibition of his Crystallized project, an ongoing meditation on the "relationship between [the] power of nature and human beings." Through his series, Tokujin attempts to create a new portrait of nature, manifested in crystalline structures. The exhibition debuted a new crystallized painting series grown by the vibration of music, "Rose," a video art piece, and "VENUS - Natural Crystal Chair" (2008).
Marc Thorpe explains that, "the most interesting aspect of [Tokujin's] exhibit is his understanding of time. The work is evolving and changing. It's never the same exhibit in detail. The objects created are not his design by physical hand, but our design by perception."
Tokujin Yoshioka adjusting his Crystallized project. Image by Marc Thorpe
When hang-drying that favorite tee I can't afford to shrink anymore, I take a coat hanger and go in through the neckhole, doing that coat hanger version of a three-point turn. On a clumsy day I'll stretch the neck a bit, but manipulating the hanger by going in through the bottom of the wet, clammy shirt is even more irritating.
The Future of Integrated Health Care
Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas
Design Miami 2011
Tokyo Design Week 2011
Born Digital: Exploring Digital Culture & Interactivity 
SHIFTBoston 2012 GLOW Competition 
Book Review: Where They Create, by Paul Barbera and Alexandra Onderwater
Book Review: Design by Nature, by Maggie Macnab
Teach Less, Integrate More 
Public Service Announcement 
Lego...for Girls?
Your First Car?
Core77 Design Awards 
SHIFTBoston 2012 Glow Competition 
Photography by Cemal Okten for Core77
Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas
The Messy Art of Saving the World
Big Idea, Little Printer
The Landscape of User Experience Design in Asia
Reporting by Marc Thorpe. Images courtesy of Tokujin Yoshioka Studio.
Tokujin Yoshioka adjusting his Crystallized project. Image by Marc Thorpe
Crystalized "Rose" and video "Rose" in background
Crystal Painting
Venus Chair
DESIGNS OF THE YEAR 2012
DESIGN MIAMI 2011
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2011
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2011
Where They Create, by Paul Barbera and Alexandra Onderwater
Design by Nature, by Maggie Macnab
The Portfolio Handbook, by the Class of 2012, Industrial Design, DAAP, University of Cincinnati
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Making Promises at the End of Time
Space Migration and Designing Our Future Habitat
The Landscape of User Experience in Asia
The Path Less Followed (or, Why I Didn't Work at Circuit City)
Masters of the Cutaway
