Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2013. We will be featuring these projects by category, so stay tuned for your favorite categories of design! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com.
Project Name: FiftyThree, Inc. Designers: FiftyThree, Inc. Design Team
Paper is the simplest and most beautiful way to create on the iPad. It allows you to express your ideas as sketches, diagrams, illustrations, notes or drawings and instantly share them across the web. Ideas begin on Paper. Our lives have become driven more and more by empty patterns of consumption. Yet we all know our most rewarding moments are those we create for ourselves. It's our calling to invent, discover, and do our best to leave this place a little better than when we arrived. We have an innate need for creativity.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
We heard via email.
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
We're re-envisioning the most essential creative tools to make them more natural and expressive. It's led us to reimagine how we create new colors and construct our own perceptive-based color space and redefine zoom [A Closer Look at Zoom] so that you never lose sight of the bigger picture. All of this just works because of the design thought and engineering rigor that we put into what we do.
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
Many of the cover letters and fan mail we receive is actually written and drawn in Paper.
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
The first day that I was confident leaving my moleskine at home and only using Paper was the moment we knew we'd built something great.
Shop Life exists at the intersection of culture and commerce. Working closely with the Tenement Museum, Potion designed an interactive counter where products tell the stories of the shops that once sold them. The Shop Life counter is the first interactive installation ever incorporated
 into the historic museum.
The installation is a twenty-four foot counter capable of hosting fifteen visitors. Vintage products chosen by the visitors reveal photos, videos, maps and oral histories that altogether tell the fascinating stories of Shop Life on the Lower East Side.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
We received an email from the awards committee. It was great for us to be able to read the jury's comments, and also see the other work featured in our category. We are honored to be in such amazing company.
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
What's great about this project, is that it continues to evolve over time. The museum has the ability to add new content to the experience, and the newest videos are interviews with the current generation of immigrants in the Lower East Side neighborhood. It is amazing to see how the same themes of family, education, and hard work are in play just around the corner, even now.
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
Right now, we are telling the stories of three businesses that inhabited the space over the past 150 years. But when the museum peeled back the paint on the walls, they found over 30 layers of paint and wallpaper. Each layer corresponds to a different tenant who moved in, and has a potential story to tell. As the Tenement museum continues its research, it has the capacity to add more objects and more stories to the experience, increasing its breadth and depth.
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
When the museum initially began excavating the space, they discovered objects like a torn newspaper from the 1800s, and a broken beer stein, that, after careful research, revealed a different chapter of the space's history. Our "ah-ha" moment was when we realized that we wanted visitors to feel that rush of discovery. We wanted them to enter the space as if they had found a key to a room that had been locked for 50 years, and discovered that the objects they found could tell their own stories. We were able to design a space that does just that.
Project Name: Sitegeist Mobile App Designers: IDEO + Sunlight Foundation
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
Sitegeist continues to earn praise and build a regular user base with downloads now approaching 85,000. While Sitegeist aims for a general audience, the real estate community has recently embraced the app to share the at-a-glance data with clients.
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
Soon after Sitegeist launched, the Sunlight Foundation received a message from some folks at the U.S. Census Bureau who were eager to discuss our experience with their data. This opened a very productive dialogue and reaffirmed the power of public data in an easy-to-use format.
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
Seeing people grasp the power of the data after showing them the visualizations in Sitegeist. Verbally describing the project and what data we included was completely different than just handing them a phone and watching them immediately understand through the simple design. The presentation of neat infographics made the information easy to pay attention to and helped anyone learn more about the area without needing to navigate a spreadsheet.
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