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: MIOS Designers: Concrete & Pantopicon
Museum In Our Street, MIOS, is a toolkit designed to invite and stimulate fellow neighbourhood members to share something about themselves in a visual way, in order to allow others to engage in conversation. This is achieved by providing a non-permanent adhesive frame, allowing citizens to create a small museum behind their street window. When people do this collectively on street level, a 'street museum' is created, providing citizens with a platform for communication. Using the provided tools, people can express their appreciation and leave notes for others. The eventual goal is to organically enhance social tissue on street level.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
We actually watched the nomination video online and cheered in choir when MIOS came up ... and won! The award means a lot to the team, both in terms of recognition for the project, but also for the role of design within society, its value to social innovation.
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
The broad interest and positive feedback that MIOS received from citizens, local authorities, street committees and the design community, both nationally and internationally, in the past months is an encouragement to Pantopicon and Concrete to take the project to the next level. At the moment we are evaluating a redesign of the toolkit and envisioning an online platform to allow people worldwide to deploy MIOS in their streets and share the outcome through pictures with their fellow global 'streetizens'. So stay tuned in the coming months!
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
During our testing phase, there was this lady who was living in a street nearby where we were testing MIOS. She played flute and had been looking for a long time for fellow music-lovers to play together. When she walked past the window of a family in the nearby street, she saw their MIOS-frame showing a series of instruments, all of which were played by members of the family. She started talking to them and they made arrangements to give it a try and play music together. This was one of the first of many moments at which we realized that the simple way in which MIOS catalyzes conversation was actually working.Â
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
There were many. For example, at first we expected people would merely show objects like pictures of their relatives, or objects related to their hobbies. So we were happily surprised to see how participants would get their families together and create these beautiful little artworks. In many if not most cases, they actually created something for the occasion rather than just frame something they had in the house.
To give you another example, there was also the moment after our intensive research phase at which we as a design team proposed a series of solutions or ideas to a group of street inhabitants. Many ideas to catalyze social cohesion were assessed, ranging from collective birthday calendars to full-fledged street games. We could have just asked them: "which idea do you like most?", but we asked them a double question "which of the proposed solutions do you like and why?" as well as "which solution would you actually engage in yourself?". Learning what attracted which type of person to which solution, taught us a lot and helped us to mould the best of ideas into what we now know as MIOS.
Project Name: 312 Park Designers: Team Starr: Jorge Angarita, Lauren Braun, Russell Flench and Janice Wong IIT Institute of Design
312Park is a service provided by the city of Chicago to help drivers in the city find parking spaces, keep track of their car and add time to meters remotely via a smartphone app. It helps drivers avoid unnecessary stress and parking tickets by letting them check location-based parking regulations and receive automatic alerts and notifications. 312Park leverages government data to recast the City as a provider of services that citizens actually want to use.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
Lauren checked the site shortly after the announcement and emailed the team and our professor. It was really exciting! Jorge and Russell learned about the win from Lauren's email and Janice found out from her friends' congratulatory tweets.
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
While we haven't worked any further on developing the project, it's been interesting to watch the City of Chicago's recent changes to the parking infrastructure. In addition, we've noticed the emergence of other apps that are trying to solve the same problem. However, none of them seem to be from the City's perspective, which we believe is a key differentiator of 312 Park in terms of data quality and consumer trust. Mostly, we just wish we had the app every time we circle the block looking for a spot.
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
Early in the project we acted out a short service scenario to externalize some of the key interaction points. The result was an exceptionally lo-fi video that involved Janice wearing an iPhone sandwich board with giant post-its for screens. Though the exercise felt silly at the time, the rough prototype it generated helped us work backwards, in a sense, to make sure that the final design supported the desired interactions, tone, flow, etc.
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
Around week four (of 15), the team stopped trying to 'boil the ocean' and decided to just focus in on one discrete aspect of citizens' interaction with government. Tackling a narrower problem -- parking in the city -- gave us the opportunity to really flesh out the service from beginning to end and create a realistic, believable demo.
Project Name: Future Air Travel in 2030 Designers: Dream Team Brunel University
SKYNEX represents the vision of air travel in 2030 by bringing users a hassle free experience from home to destination. SKYNEX consists of numerous service features to assist users during their journey. The service system is integrated into users' personal smart devices providing touch points over ticket booking, airport navigation, flight information tracking and digital wallet. SKYNEX also accommodates a door-to-door baggage handling service as well as digital tags for users to track their luggage in real time. Other SKYNEX service features, such as airport lounge, in-flight seat customization and speed security check-in are also comprised in the system.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
The Dream Team have shared a group on Facebook since the Future Air Travel 2030 project began, there they have had the chance to post and share articles, photos, books and all kind of information related to air travel experiences.
On June 10th, one of the leaders of the group, who was constantly following the Core77 awards posted some wonderful news with the help of a few exclamation marks; the Dream Team won a service student notable Core77 award with the project Future Air Travel 2030!
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
Every year, in the heart of London, Brunel University has a design and engineering event called Made in Brunel, a place where big companies such as BT, Coca Cola and Sony come to see and award the projects that new generations are creating.
This year, The Dream Team, made of students from the MA Design Strategy & Innovation and the MSc Integrated Product Design, participated with the project "Future Air Travel 2030".
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
The Dream Team has always been characterized to work together, but not only for the creation of new ideas for their projects, but also to have fun while doing it. "we always waited for the perfect moment to hack into Allen's Facebook account during the breaks and we managed to do it several times!"
Also, hidden talents were discovered while creating the video for the Future Air Travel 2030. Allen Tsai showed his great future air travel singing abilities by creating Skynex soundtrack called "Are you ready to fly with the Skynex?".
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
What are the things that make us feel more stressed while travelling? That was the question we asked ourselves, and after hours of talking about our experiences and finding out which are the problems that we have in common, we said: "a-ha! Here we have a good opportunity to create a hassle free air travel experience".
The fact that we are not from the same country and that we have all had the opportunity to travel to other countries helped us to analyse everything from a broader point of view.
Project Name: Welcomesburg Designers: Jacqueline Cooksey and Benjamin Winter Parsons the New School for Design
WELCOMESBURG is a service design initiative. It is a mobile workshop that stimulates discussion and awareness around gentrification. The project enables a better understanding for collaboration in order to solve a problem of such complexity. The project is inspired by the popular carbon "footprinting" and "offsetting" schemes and consists of a range of services designed to confront new residents with the unintended consequences of their presence in the community. By playfully challenging neighbors to directly support each other's best interests and 'offset' their 'gentrification footprints'. These offsets range from supportive to downright ridiculous.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
I watched it live; I wasn't going to at first because I thought I'd be too nervous. But it was a great way to see the nominations and projects unfold.
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
Welcomesburg, well into its second year, will be leveraging its new brand image, website and promotional material to apply for new funding. We want to create an interactive digital version of the Welcome Wagon, where online users can test their gentrification footprint and select offsets from an increasing database -- fed and expanded by residents and locals. The results of this dynamic online participation is to track and report new inclusive actions and services, not only across Williamsburg but potentially, nation wide. We would also like to grow an online resource centre for those who are "feeling displaced" featuring suggestions, rental guidelines and useful contacts.
In addition, the Welcome Wagon is dusting itself off and getting back on the streets of Williamsburg (and beyond!) We are looking for collaborators, community programs, museums and festivals to host our cart so we can continue the conversation around gentrification, urban issues, human rights and design as a vehicle for change.
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
We saw a NYPD cop circling the corner of Bedford and N7th where we'd set up three welcome mats, our recorder and a camera. We umm-mmed and ahh-hhed about whether to leave but decided to stand strong against a little police pressure. We kept an eye on him as he keenly kept an eye on us. Eventually he made his way over and asked us to leave the area, labeling our mats hazardous. We complied but returned the next day.
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
We spoke to one lady who was referred to us by her neighbor. She had just come from spending her fifth day in housing court. We saw as she broke down in tears as she began to describe how her landlord was using dirty tactics as a way to evict her from her home, an apartment she'd been living in with her family for over 25 years. Thinking we weren't doing enough, we asked how else we could help, her reply was "just being here helps".
We had several encounters like this and I believe they are testament to how design can contribute to these challenging problems -- we managed to turn a complex problem into a creative conversation. Not everyone is willing or able to engage in community politics and we felt that our approach managed to bridge a gap, even if somewhat small, between high-level problem and the ordinary individuals who are wrapped up in it.
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