"The best interaction design doesn't just make things easier to use, it opens up new spaces for play and collaboration to enhance our relationship with the world and each other," explained jurist Robert Fabricant, VP of Creative at frog. Kicking off the announcements for this year's inaugural IxDA Interaction Awards, San Francisco-based agency Stimulant won Best in Show AND the Best in Category, Expressing for Loop Loop, an innovative music sequencer app that encourages kids and adults to create improvised musical compositions using their Sifteo cubes to stitch and layer a set of samples and beats.
The People's Choice Award went to Interaction Cubes by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation/Museum of Life. The project is an interactive module created for the exhibit "Elementar: a química que faz o mundo" (Elementary: the chemistry that makes up our world) for the Museum of Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
From a pool of over 300 entries representing 33 countries, 26 projects were awarded honors in the categories of Best in Show, Best Concept, Best Student, People's Choice, and Best in Category for Optimizing, Connecting, Disrupting, Expressing, Engaging and Empowering.
Best Concept went to Out of the Box by London-based Vitamins, and the award for Best Student was given to Ishac Bertran from Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design for his project Pas-à-Pas.
Attention student designers: The 2012 James Dyson Award is now open for entry, seeking solutions from design or engineering students from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UK and the US.
If you students were to enter most world-class design competitions, you'd undoubtedly be at a disadvantage for lacking the resources and experience of, say, a legacy design firm. Alternatively there's always an abundance of small-scale student design competitions, if you don't mind designing your ass off for a chance to win a gift certificate to Houlihan's. But the Dyson comp carries a US $15,000 purse and is geared towards you specifically because you're young and have little experience. In Dyson's own words,
Young people have an unsullied view of the world. Budding engineers and designers can use their fresh perspective to develop wonderfully simple solutions to baffling problems. Original ideas and rigorously engineered projects will attract the attention of the judges. I challenge applicants to think big and use the award as a springboard for your idea.
You've gotta love the six-word brief—"Design something that solves a problem"—and lack of a registration fee. Also, even recent students can enter; anyone who was an undergrad design or engineering student anytime in the last four years is eligible.
We are so hungry after perusing the Design in the Wildentries from the EAT category! Incredible readers from around the world submitted beautifully designed everyday objects that help them prep, cook, eat and drink. Whether it was your kitchen's 1985 General Electric Stove or a seat at your favorite cafe, we were delighted to be a guest at your dining table in this round's EAT submissions. Today we're opening up submissions for our second theme, PLAY, and announcing the jury and popular pick theme winners—theme winners receive their choice of Braun products and are qualified to move forward into the final round of voting for the grand prize of a notebook computer and tablet!
We can turn nearly anything into a game, but design can significantly improve the experience. Is table tennis better inside on a wooden table, or outdoors on a concrete one? Which apps are you drawn to over and over, and what board games have passed the test of time? What are the brilliant tools you use to paint, to crochet, to solder, or to hack with?
Cutlery of the armed forces of Germany. The fork functions like a spring to fix everything in the carrying case which is also a can opener. I am not a fan of collecting military items, but the cutlery works really great. I always showing it to my students as example of great functional design.
POPULAR WINNER
Citrus Squeezer Taylor Welden, United States
We didn't have these when I grew up in the Northeast. When I moved to the South, Texas specifically, there is much more citrus (limes are 12/$1) and the need to extract the juice from citrus increases dramatically. Margaritas are an every day type of drink here, not something fancy for Saturdays. Lime and lemon juice are used in all types of cuisine, especially as an element Mexican dishes. That being said, when I moved here, I knew exactly what this item did the first time I saw it. I purchased mine for $3 or $4 almost 10 years ago, it still looks and performs as new. Heavy duty aluminum parts, nice colorful thick coating, no plastic parts anywhere, no branding anywhere. A simple tool, easily overlooked. It squeezes every last drop out of the citrus, quickly, easily, efficiently. No mess and no acid in the eyes either. Squeeze, juice pours out, open it up, the citrus half pops out to be easily discarded. Perfect. Genius.
Global company Proto Labs, which bills itself as "the world's fastest provider of CNC machined parts and injection moulded parts," runs an award program called "Cool Idea!" whereby they award promising design concepts with credits to use their services. Introduced last year in the United States, "Cool Idea!" is being expanded into Europe this year, in keeping with the company's global facilities.
We're here to help make cool ideas come to life, in the form of smart, enjoyable, problem-solving, life-improving and of course, brilliantly successful products. There are a lot of competitions for products that are already in production and on the market. The Cool Idea! Award comes in much further upstream, at the design and development stage, when innovators are too often stymied by lack of resources to turn their ideas into real products.
If you're wondering about specifically what you can design, the competition is pretty open-ended in terms of content: "We look for anything that would make life a little better, easier, safer, healthier, less frustrating, more fun—if it's cool and it involves parts that Proto Labs can make, it's fair game," writes the company. And while they haven't specified what the individual awards breakdown will be, or even how many finalists they intend to select, they've reported the total credit awarded will add up to $250,000.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis and reviewed monthly, up until the final deadline at the end of this calendar year. And while winning a "Cool Idea!" award is no guarantee of future success--one of last year's winners was the non-Kickstarted Quickaddy we posted about earlier--as far as we can tell there's no application fee, so you've got no reason not to try. Check out the Rules & Regulations here.
Update from Proto Labs:
We just thought we'd get in touch to help clarify the parts it looks like there were some questions on in the article.
You're right, we're very open-ended as far as what kinds of products can be submitted, and ultimately what we choose to get awarded. We know there are tons of great ideas spanning many categories whose inventors are hoping to get their break, so we didn't want to limit what kinds of ideas can be submitted. Like we mention, as long as we can make it, there's a possibility of being a recipient of the award. That brings me to the individual breakdown of the awards and how many recipients we'll have. Since we don't know how many or when we'll receive applications for ideas we think should win a Cool Idea! Award, the specific number of winners and dates we'll name winners cannot be defined. As far as the breakdown of each award, that cannot be defined either, because each is different in its needs - we award the recipients our services free of charge to get that initial push.
The goal of the award is to give the inventors of these products we name as a Cool Idea! Award recipient the chance to get their idea off the ground when they may otherwise not have gotten that chance due to lack of resources or funding. Since we are in the business of providing prototype and short-run production parts, we stick to that, and the marketing (beyond our press release, exposure on our website, social media mentions, case study, etc) and ultimate future success of the product is up to the creator of the product.
There's no application fee, and people can apply up to four times per calendar year - as long as the ideas are significantly different from each other.
Only two weeks left in the regular entry period for the 2012 IDSA IDEA Awards. Since 1980, the IDSA has been honoring design excellence through their international awards program. This year, the program includes categories that encompass products, ecodesign, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research and concepts. Get your work in front of leaders within the field of design including Core77 friends Tad Toulis, Lance Hussey, Mike Kruzeniski, Jan Chipchase and more. For our Brazilian readers, register for the IDEA/Brasil Awards here!
Check out some of our favs from 2011—bronze, silver and gold—for inspiration or head over to the IDEA2012 website for more details and to enter! The deadline for regular submissions is February 10th, 2012 (with late registration continuing till February 17th, 2012.)
Just a reminder that SUNDAY is the last day you can submit entries into Round 1 of the Braun & Core77 Design in the Wild global photo challenge. Enter today for a chance to win the grand prize package of an industry leading notebook computer AND tablet not to mention your pick of Braun products for theme winners.
All you have to do is snap a picture of great design in everyday objects you encounter. Check out what entries we've seen so far and enter today! Voting opens up on Monday to pick a theme winner and our next theme, PLAY starts by Friday. Remember, you are what you EAT so snap up inspiration at this weekend's brunch, playoff party or while you're in the kitchen. Good design is all around, so take a moment to capture it, and enter today.
Design in the Wild is presented with the support of BraunPrize 2012. Established in 1968, the international BraunPrize competition is a triennial design competition aimed at promoting the work of young designers, highlighting the importance of industrial design and increasing the profile of innovative product ideas globally. This year's theme, "Genius design for a better everyday," emphasizes the importance of well-designed products that enhance the everyday lives of consumers around the world. Visit the BraunPrize 2012.
In our increasingly interconnected world, giving is no longer bound by geographic, ethnic or other traditional parameters. From donating online to donating overseas, people are making unprecedented choices about where to give, to whom and why.
So what will giving look like in the 21st century? It certainly won't be done by collecting coins in a box anymore. And it's got to go beyond giving to our family and neighbors.
Enter the Where Do You Give? National Design Competition. Where Do You Give? challenges artists to create a 21st century icon inspired by the values and imagery of the traditional Jewish tzedakah, or charity, box. The design competition "seeks to bring an ancient Jewish ritual object—the tzedakah box—into active dialogue with contemporary thinking about philanthropy and social change. We hope to catalyze deeper engagement around what philanthropy means in our increasingly interconnected, global and technologically accelerated world," according to the project's website.
Contestants have until March 1, 2012 to submit their entry in one of three categories: a traditional collection box; an interactive multimedia and user interface design for websites, mobile devices and web- or mobile-based games; or "outside the box", which can include exploratory or conceptual design.
The grand prize winner will receive $2,500 cash and an opportunity to travel with AJWS to visit some of their partners in the developing world. All finalists will receive $250 and have their work included in a national mobile tour.
To learn more about the competition, visit wheredoyougive.org. Ready to design the future of giving? Register to submit here.
"Co-Creation Community" Local Motors continues their fostering of geography-specific vehicle designs with their DRIVEN design competition, which begins today. The Design of Relevant and Innovative Vehicles for Energy Needs competition is the result of a collaboration with fuel giant Shell's GameChanger branch, which provides funding for alternative energy projects.
Five cities have been chosen as the context for the competition's designs: Amsterdam, Bangalore, Basra, Houston and São Paolo. Hit the jump to see the promo video and the "unique challenges for the future of mobility" presented by each city.
With our Fast Track to the Mobile App winners, there are two parallel lines of development: those who are working with Microsoft developers, and those who are doing their own implementation/development. In this installment, we'll take you through this initial phase of taking the app from concept to reality, highlighting steps that anyone interested in designing and implementing an app would take, and give you some background on what the winners are doing specifically.
Contestants were asked to submit up to five screens and a description of the proposed app, with the option of adding supporting documentation such as a video or presentation. Starting with a strong conceptual and design foundation for the app, the next step for existing or potential developers is to build out to a workable prototype. This might translate to different actions depending on the circumstances.
For Social Mints, Pratik Kothari's app provides business users the ability to monitor social media mentions of their brand, interests or other pertinent topics (e.g., customer service), that meant considering the judges' feedback on the use of 'Mint' and the visualization choices. In response, he bolstered the metaphor by clearly tying each keyword to a mint; he considered different visualization patterns, and settled on one that he felt would most clearly display the data. To think through the app's interactions, Kothari created wireframes to map out the user experience of the app; these then contributed to the creation of any remaining screens. He's at a point where he can look at the different cloud-based services that allow for Social Mints to fetch real-time data from various social media sites.
Geof Harries and Michael Johnson, the designer and developer behind Cash Hound, a business cash flow management app that quickly determines how specific costs can impact your bottom line, moved towards building a workable prototype by focusing on the back-end first. Their app was formerly named Rhythmatic. When the winning team found an existing iPhone app with the same name. Even though the app had a completely different usage (rhythm/music gaming), they chose to change their app name to Cash Hound in order to avoid confusion and allow for freedom to develop the business app on different platforms. The core functional concepts will remain the same, but the visual design (colors and textures) will change a bit.
Can you spot Design in the Wild? Braun & Core77 have collaborated to create Design in the Wild, a global photo challenge to identify the instances of great design that surround each of us every day.
Today we're throwing open the doors to our international challenge—we're asking participants to photograph the most useful, innovative and just plain genius designs that we encounter on a daily basis, based around the 4 everyday themes of EAT, PLAY, WORK and RELAX. Each theme has an entry period, plus an additional 3 days when visitors can vote for their favorites—the submission with the most votes becomes that theme's Popular winner. Additionally our Design in the Wild team will also pick a Jury winner for each theme, resulting in 2 theme winners for each round. At the end, the 8 winners become finalists in a last round of voting and judging to select the Runner-up and Grand Prize winners!
So start looking around and considering what great designs you encounter everyday: did the new round-about in your commute really improve traffic flow? Does the coffee shop near your office move people through the queue faster than you can get your cash out of your wallet? Have you jogged off all the extra holiday meals already because of a great biometric health tracking gadget or a simple pedometer? Do you and your pets all relax in blankets with sleeves at the end of the day?
Enter all the best examples of genius designs in your life, and vote for your favorites at www.core77.com/braunprize2012.
Design in the Wild is presented with the support of BraunPrize 2012. Established in 1968, the international BraunPrize competition is a triennial design competition aimed at promoting the work of young designers, highlighting the importance of industrial design and increasing the profile of innovative product ideas globally. This year's theme, "Genius design for a better everyday," emphasizes the importance of well-designed products that enhance the everyday lives of consumers around the world. Visit the BraunPrize 2012.
By now, you might've already looked over the five winning entries in the Fast Track to the Mobile App design competition, and seen the list of the 95 finalists who impressed judges with their combination of practical, creative and fun concepts. Over the next month, we'll follow the winners as they pair up with developers to turn those designs into workable apps.
Three winners (Black Belt, Bridge, and car pal+) will be paired with well-known Windows Phone developers or MVPs (Most Valuable Professional) who expressed an affinity to work on a specific winning app. Two of the winners (Social Mints and Rhythmatic) will be doing their own development. Winners and finalists will be connected to a Microsoft Mobile Phone Champ—Windows Phone mavens who are developers in the winners' regions with intimate knowledge of the ins-and-outs of app building, to help them along. Then, it's on to making a to-do list of necessary steps to ready their designs for launch in the Windows Phone Marketplace by February 15th. We want to encourage everyone who entered the contest to go through as much of the app development process as they can to bring their proposals to life. In this special series, we'll be exploring that process as the winners prepare their apps for entry into the Windows Phone Marketplace.
As of the beginning of the month, the IDSA International Design Excellence Awards is open for submissions for its 32nd consecutive year. "With its storied history, impartial jurying process, international pool of exceptional entrants, impartial expert jurors, breadth of categories, and forward thinking criteria, IDEA 2012 is uniquely positioned to shine a spotlight on design genius."
The brief is as timely and relevant as ever:
We live in a global community with unique challenges and opportunities in which great design is uniquely positioned to improve daily life and experiences. Design touches people every minute of every day. It shapes the world, experience and daily lives. Great design envisions reinvents and creates the future we want rather than the one we are handed.
To that end, the IDSA is calling for designers the world over to submit the best of the best: exceptional design that epitomizes quality across design mediums and platforms. Given that IDEA has maintained and honed its reputation as the preeminent international design competition, it should come as no surprise that it is also known as the "Oscars of Design."
Of course, just as the very definition of design continues to grow at an ever-increasing pace, the awards program has evolved over the past three decades, and 2012 is no exception. IDEA2012 features several new categories: Digital Design; Service Design; Social Impact Design; Bathrooms, Spas and Wellness; Gardens & Outdoor; Kitchens; and Living Room and Bedroom. (See the full list of categories here.)
Check out some of our favs from 2011—bronze, silver and gold—for inspiration or head over to the IDEA2012 website for more details and to enter! The deadline for submissions is February 17, 2012.
Marcel Wanders' most recent version of his popular Can Can pendant for FLOS made it's debut at online retailer YLighting. In celebration, FLOS and YLighting are challenging designers to transform the new Can Can pattern into your own product pattern. The Pattern Play Design Contest asks for contestants to, "apply the inner pattern onto unexpected places," for a chance to win $2500 and a FLOS Can Can Light. Enter now...the contest ends January 15th and you don't want to miss the opportunity to have your work in front of judges Piero Gandini (CEO of FLOS), Sean Callahan (CEO of YLighting) and Marcel Wanders himself!
During this past year's ICFF, New Yorker's decide to apply Marcel Wanders' iconic patterns on their own bodies by getting tattooed at FLOS' SoHo location. Check the video of the experiment from the Get Lit, Get Ink'd event from May after the jump.
All winners and finalists will receive a 1-year subscription to the App Hub development community and the first 25 finalists who launch their apps in the Windows Marketplace will become our Notable Finalists, scoring a Windows Phone. Winners not only receive a subscription to App Hub, Windows Phone and XBox 360 with Kinect, but they also get an app development deal to fast track their apps to the Windows Marketplace. Keep checking back over the next couple months as we start Phase 2 of the competition: following the winners along the development path from design to launching their apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Without further ado...
WINNERS
Bridge - an integrated mobile tool for small team collaboration across time zones.
Ying Wei is a passionate User Experience designer specializing in user research, user interface and interaction design. She received her Bachelor's degree in Interface Design from Multimedia University, Malaysia in 2007 and her Master's degree in Interaction Design from Kookmin University, Seoul, South Korea in Feb 2011. She was an interaction designer at Autodesk in Shanghai where her responsibility is to assist the development of the global products and workflows such as AutoCAD Map3D and Digital Cities projects in a global team spreading over US, Canada, and China.
Currently, she is working as an information architect in Seoul.
Ying Wei loves traveling and exploring different countries and cultures.
Blackbelt - a level-up based business app aimed at improving company productivity and employee self awareness through objectives, incentives and competition.
New freelancer Mark William Salerno set out to become a car designer yet could not deny his passion for mixed design disciplines in Arts, Graphic, Multimedia and Industrial Design.
Earning 'The Man' nickname at Design Innovation Milano, he became an ID project leader and international tutor. Moving to the design capital in 2006, he completed a master course with Alfa Romeo at the famous Scuola Politecnica di Design. An upbringing in Australia excelled his natural skills with studies at Swinburne TAFE and Monash University.
Utlizing all facets of art and design, he continues to develop a fine 'explore-filter-evolve' cycle of creative labor.
Social Mints - easily track and measure what people are saying about a company, brand or new product across the social media landscape.
Pratik Kothari works as Director of IT for reQuire, LLC and also runs his own company Techark Consultancy. Kothari holds a Bachelor's and Master's in Computer Science and is passionate about solving challenging problems.
Microsoft has recognized Kothari as a Developer Hero for his extremely popular Windows Phone apps: Mood Swing, Dress Pal, Smart Goals, RedMinder and ...honey, I got it! All his apps are very practical and based out of necessities in one's daily life. An AppHub Spotlight on Kothari's apps is available here.
Rhythmatic - an easy to use and powerful business cash-flow management mobile app.
Geof Harries is a designer who is most commonly hired to research, plan and conceive user interfaces for enterprise software products. When not working on client projects, he and the team at Subvert develop their own commercial software products built on the Microsoft technology platform. Outside of work, Geof loves to spend time with his wife and three children. He occasionally can be found in the Yukon wilderness atop his mountain bike, cross-country skis or snowboard.
car-pal+ - helps road warriors track fuel efficiency, find the nearest gas station, and monitor road alerts and maintenance history.
Alan Asher is an aspiring 28-year-old entrepreneur and digital-media designer whose passion is interface design and user experience. He enjoys designing and consulting from start-up ventures to enterprise-level applications.
With six years of business and technology experience in the financial-services industry, Alan looks forward to meeting new people, learning from new opportunities, and engaging in new challenges. His other interests include finance, technological trends and photography.
Alan is also an active member of his local community, dedicating personal time to programs like Junior Achievement to cultivate young business leaders of the future.
We can't reveal too much about these apps before they're launched, but here are the finalists we'll also be keeping an eye on:
Heineken is pleased to present an opportunity for designers to "create a bottle design that symbolizes how people around the world will connect in the next 140 years." The timeframe refers to the forthcoming 140th anniversary of the Dutch beer brand come 2013, and December of next year will see the release of a Limited Edition pack to commemorate the occasion. The twist? "Using the design tools on Heineken's Facebook page people must connect their design concept (can be illustration, photography, graphic design...anything) with that of a complete stranger to create a joint entry as a virtual design duo."
Download the template and toolkit from Heineken's competition page, http://yourfuturebottle.com, then, once you've uploaded it to the gallery, connect with other designers. "Your design is one half of a bottle, so connect with another designer in the gallery to create your complete bottle entry."
Entries will be judged by: Mark van Iterson, Global Head of Design at Heineken; Mark Dytham, Co-Founder, PechaKucha; and Evan Orensten, Co-Founder and Executive Editor, Cool Hunting. Heineken's "Your Future Bottle" competition closes on January 31, 2012.
Last summer, we were pleased to announce the Poultry Project's inaugural Chicken Coop Design Competition. The US-based non-profit is "committed to providing HIV/AIDS-affected orphans with an opportunity to earn income as poultry farmers," collaborating with TASO, an indigenous Ugandan AIDS service organization, to "provide participating families with chickens (4 hens + 1 rooster), veterinary services, training, a bicycle, ongoing support and a chicken coop."
For this year's competition, they're inviting "designers, architects, dreamers, thinkers, chicken keeping fanatics, farmers, carpenters and everyone else with a good coop design" to not only design a "community garden chicken coop" but to adapt it for use in rural Uganda.
It's arguably an area of design that doesn't see much innovation—RAAD Architects' Chicken Co-Op aside—though the Poultry Project is happy to help entrants with their designs, "especially with the Uganda-use modification process (we can suggest local materials; tell you about the weather and landscape; direct you to helpful resources)." They also note that "your community garden coop design should consider YOUR local environment."
Beam Summer Camp in Strafford, NH is an 8-week program for aspiring builders, architects, designers, and DIY-ers aged 7-17. Each year the camp "commissions unique large-scale collaborative" designs for projects that are built by the campers over the course of the summer. Previous years' projects have included rolling machines, floating contraptions, aerial installations, and tree houses. Beam Camp is actively seeking proposals for next summer's project, with a deadline of December 31st. Let your imaginations run wild!
Infiniti Design is a "young, rapidly-growing brand" that has taken to championing dynamism and internationality, alongside creativity, innovation, technology and design culture. The second edition of the Infiniti Design De-Contest, "Living Everywhere"—open to designers born after January 1, 1972—looks towards film as a source of inspiration for furniture design.
Aimed at young designers of any nationality, it will award projects that best represent one of the five continents, taking inspiration from how they have been portrayed in some internationally renowned movies.
Taking as a starting point the idea that the history of design should be seen as a process of evolution which draws inspiration from all the different parts and arts of the world, designers are asked to design innovative furnishings which represent their continent of origin, interpreting this continent according to how it is portrayed in the world of cinema... In other words, when creating their design, designers must use a film which is set entirely in the continent where they live as their inspiration.
Thus, the categories are simply three regions: Europe & Africa, Asia & Oceania and the Americas. Films include everything from Casablanca to Invictus, Doctor Zhivago to Slumdog Millionaire, New York, New York to The Big Lebowski—for each region, respectively—for a total of 24 films (eight per region).
Winners, as judged by an "expert panel of judges" will receive a contract from Infiniti to produce their entry, which can be a chair, stool, table or "other home furnishing accessory." The deadline for submissions is February 29, 2012... which will allow just enough time for the winning products to be exhibited at the Salone del Mobile di Milano 2012.
Top: G-Chair by Jakob Thau; Bottom: Drop Chair by Radice-Orlandini Design; courtesy of Infiniti
Click here for more details, or skip ahead to the announcement (PDF), which has the full list of films.
Good news! We know you're going to ask for it, so we're extending our Fast Track to the Mobile App design challenge a full two days through this coming weekend (Extended deadline—Sunday, November 20th, 11:59pm EST). Now there's no excuse not to put the finishing touches on your app design submissions. If you've been sitting on the sidelines thinking you'd never get your entry done in time for this Friday, you've got an extra 48 hours to go for the gold, or in this case, an app development deal to help bring your masterpiece to marketplace. You're welcome!
If you're just tuning in, Fast Track to the Mobile App is a mobile app design competition giving designers with little-to-no coding experience an opportunity to get your best business and workplace app concepts into the Windows Phone Marketplace. You'll retain the rights to your design and share revenues with a partner developer on your app sales. There's a whole list of prizes including the chance to have your winning work presented at Mobile World Congress in 2012. So check out the competition site, register if you haven't already, and submit your best entries by 11:59pm EST this Sunday, November 20th.
February 2012 will see the fifth annual IxDA conference, Interaction12, in Dublin, Ireland. Over the course of the first four days of the month, the Convention Center and IADT will host a series of keynotes, presentations and workshops for interaction designers from across the globe.
In conjunction with the conference, the IxDA is challenging the next generation of ace interaction designers to "design the future of the news":
People follow breaking news via Twitter. Tablets, mobile phones, paywalls, RSS feeds, viral videos and other elements have found their way into the current news landscape. The experience has swollen far beyond the icons of the daily newspaper on your doorstep and the 6 o'clock newscast.
We know that people are consuming news differently, and these emerging practices are changing the news...
This year, Thomson Reuters and the IxDA challenge you to look beyond the forms of delivery to address the behaviors, interactions and goals that surround news.
The Interaction12 Student Design Challenge is intended to examine issues including but not limited to: what people are trying to achieve with the news; how we identify important or relevant stories; and emerging trends in news reportage, from hyperlocal to citizen journalism.
The first stage consists of a video 'audition,' in which "the judges will be looking for interaction design ability and how you communicate your thinking on the theme, rather than examining any design work you've done to create solutions around the theme." Finalists will receive travel and accommodation to Dublin, as well as student registration in Interaction12 and enrollment in an on-site masterclass that consists of additional opportunities (read: prizes).
Submit your video by December 5 for a chance to win; see more details and the full registration form here.
Motivational posters are one of those uncanny cultural touchstones that have become so deeply intertwined with irony that they're practically parodies of themselves these days. Still, Wikipedia notes that they can have a measurable impact on behavior, and, given the current state of the world—symbolized by grassroots movements such as Occupy Wall Street—we're long overdue for positive messaging for posterity.
This is precisely the brief for The Say Something Project's second poster competition, "This Way Forward."
The Say Something Poster Project is a poster design competition and gallery show created to give designers the opportunity to "say something" that will inspire, motivate and educate the next generation.
Reflect on recent times and analyze the many significant events that have occurred throughout the world or within your life.
You are free to choose the subject matter—environmental, economical, political, personal, etc.—however, the successful poster will focus on the "Why" or the "How" behind an event and turn it into a teaching moment...
Your message should be presented in such a way that it is understood and appreciated by young adults, ages 16 to 25. Consider this your target audience.
Judging will occur over the course of three stages: a first pass of online voting to narrow the field to 100 designs, from which a panel of esteemed judges will select 25 semifinalists for a public gallery exhibition. The ten winners will be selected from another vote, conducted in person at the Poster Show. All 25 semifinalists will receivea full-size print of their poster design; the ten winners' designs will be permanently installed at the Boys & Girls Club of Boston, plus design-related prizes courtesy of Rockport publishing, Communication Arts and HOW magazines, and Thinkstock.
In less than two weeks, judges start reviewing design submissions for the Fast Track to the Mobile App contest—an international Windows Phone app design challenge. The competition, launched last month by Core77 and the Windows Phone design team, challenges designers to create work productivity solutions tailored for the Windows Phone. The contest theme addresses the work we often find ourselves doing on our ubiquitous little computers (i.e., smartphones) and asks designers to consider how we might do it more effectively.
Applicants design the face of the app—no coding or further app development necessary—and enter anything from sketches to full color comps along with an app description. We're looking for great ideas and designs—we'll help the best ideas get built. Part of the prizing is to encourage our winning and finalist designers to take these great ideas and, if they need, pair them up with experienced Windows Phone developers so that these apps don't just stay concepts, but are actually made and launched in the Windows Marketplace, with revenue going to the designers and developers who made them. We'll be following the development process as the winning designs are transformed from concept into reality, and are launched in the Windows Marketplace. Our hope is to get as many thoughtful, interesting designs that we can, launched and out into the app world.
The Windows Phone 7.5, Microsoft's most recent mobile product and platform, was released this September, and has been receiving uniform praise on its 500+ improvements from the Windows Phone 7. With the release of the new Windows 7.5 OS (codenamed Mango), and the clean, uncluttered Metro user interface, it's been given the critical "thumbs up" for doing a lot of things right, with the consensus being that it's a worthy addition to the mobile marketplace. But, Microsoft's ambitions for the phone requires that it grab a bigger chunk of users and app developers. Right now, Windows has some 30,000 apps available, nearly double their number from six months ago. Though the growth is impressive, for comparison's sake Android has roughly 250,000 and Apple, 500,000. While Windows claim of having quality over quantity might be true, apps and app development are measures of confidence in a device.
Since it's a recent release, conclusions about Microsoft's sales performance in the mobile market are in let's-wait-and-see mode. However, the phone's design and functionality opens itself to some unique app possibilities. Live tiles can be double-sided and have multiple uses, and App Connect links search with apps (e.g., searching for fast food might yield a delivery app alongside other results). It's getting praise for Metro's out-of-the-box differences like its blocky, non-grid user interface and Window 7.5's integration of features like barcode scanning and song ID into the OS. The Fast Track to the Mobile App competition encourages designers to experiment with Windows phone particular functionality in app development. For example, for Foursquare's Windows app, they utilized the live tiles to pin 'places' and 'specials' to the phone's start screen. The phone is also notably person-centric, meaning that communication is grouped by person rather than medium, so, your chats, emails and texts from your best friend are all grouped under her as a contact, along with her chat availability.
It amazing to me that you can take several dozen opinionated design experts from around the world, throw them in an airplane-hangar-sized space filled with design objects for two days, and get them to reach a consensus on which are the most awards-worthy. But that's exactly what happened a few weeks ago, when the iF International Forum Design convened 44 jurors to examine over 4,000 entries and select the winners of the 2012 iF Design Awards.
This year they actually shot the proceedings and posted them on YouTube to launch iF Close-up, the organization's new monthly video podcast. We don't get to see any jurors heatedly issuing broken-beer-bottle challenges or rolling around on the floor, but the five-minute video does give you an idea of what goes on at the proceedings. As Awards Chairman Professor Fritz Frenkler notes, one of the biggest challenges in wading through such an enormous selection is getting everyone to stay fresh, so that the objects perused in the evenings are getting the same fair shake as the ones viewed in the mornings.
Hit the jump for a complete list of people you see (and hear) in the video.
It's time to fire-up your favorite image editor, grab a cup of coffee and crank out that awesome app idea you've been dreaming about for the Fast Track to the Mobile App design challenge. There's less than two weeks remaining to enter with a shot at winning one of five revenue-sharing development deals to help bring your app idea to Windows Marketplace, along with other great prizes.
In recent weeks we've been seeing lots of great app entries coming in that tackle all sorts of daily business tasks like trend analyzing, intuitive tools for note taking and every other area of work life that could benefit from some sort of push-button ease-of-use. The real beauty of this design challenge is there's no coding or programming experience required. Right now, more than ever, designers from all practices with little or no IX design experience can participate in this exciting and expansive area of product design that is increasingly effecting the world's population in a positive way. We've even got some great Photoshop templates that take some of the work out of prototyping your apps screen designs.
If you haven't signed up, there's still time to register and submit your great idea. Login to enter and submit your entry by midnight on Friday, November 18th!
This year's Los Angeles Auto Show Design Challenge is one of the more fun design competitions we've seen in a while. Tasked with designing "Hollywood's Hottest New Movie Car," major auto studios are vying for the prize by not only designing a car, but by coming up with a theoretically feature-worthy story to go along with it.
Honda has gone futuristic-meets-Western with their IH (Intelligent Horse) concept, intended to inhabit a moviescape called High Noon—no relation to the original—that follows themes of the post-apocalyptic variety:
Honda takes us hundreds of years into the future to a world disrupted by the impact of a gigantic comet. The resulting heat and drought have wiped out technology, infrastructure and life as we know it, making it imperative for the few remaining survivors to recover faster than any human generation before. The few scientists have created a vehicle that serves as a companion and protector in the inhospitable and lonely environment. Their inspiration—the legend and material remains of an ancient creature called the horse.
The tulip glass is a textbook example of a design object that has crossover appeal for particularly astute (some might say snobby) subset of imbibers, the contingent of beer-quaffing gastronomes that has grown alongside the microbrewing trend.
A tulip glass not only helps trap the aroma, but also aids in maintaining large heads, creating a visual and olfactory sensation. The body is bulbous, but the top flares out to form a lip which helps head retention. It is recommended for serving Scottish ales, American double/imperial IPAs, barleywines, Belgian ales and other aromatic beers. Some pint glasses which taper outwards towards the top are also called tulip glasses, despite having notably less curvature.
The WIkipedia article quoted above tellingly includes a photo of Duvel, arguably the definitive Belgian strong ale, as an example of a style befitting the iconic glass, emblazoned with their unmistakable red logo. If the Internet is any indication, the Duvel tulip glass, in particular, has something of a cult following (across at least threeseparatethreads on Beer Advocate forums).
The brand is clearly aware of this enthusiasm, as they launched a series of artist collaborations for their classic glassware back in 2007, featuring limited-edition designs from the likes of Arne Quinze, Denis Meyers, Parra, Eley Kishimoto, Daan Stuyven and Stefan Glerum.
Glasses by Stefan Glerum (L) and Arne Quinze (R)
Now, Duvel is opening the field to designers in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom with an open call for the next tulip glass design in the Duvel Collection.
The grand prize, of course, will be full-scale production of the winning entry alongside the canon of current and future artists. Three second place winners will also win a trip to the finals in Paris, along with 50 glasses each, while ten third place finishers will receive a set of six of their designs.
DESIGN MIAMI 2011
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2011
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2011
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2011
Reporting by Yin Ho
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Inaugural (2010) winner Emily Axtman with her finished coop; she posted 
Top: G-Chair by Jakob Thau; Bottom: Drop Chair by Radice-Orlandini Design; courtesy of Infiniti
Glasses by Stefan Glerum (L) and Arne Quinze (R)
Drafts by Parra
