Archive for the 'design' Category
Discussion: Design Competitions worth it?
Comments(4)
Regular reader Scott asks:
We designers and innovators struggle all the time to get our name “out there” so we can more quickly push our designs into reality. Entering (and winning) such contests as Muji can certainly help, but at what cost?
If you sit back and look at the bigger picture of what is happening, it is really quite sad. Let’s say a huge company needs to develop a new fun dispenser for their soap product. They can spend millions hiring a prestigious design firm to get a filtered short list of a few new ideas put together by a team of perhaps 5 designers, or they can sponsor a design competition - disguise their motive in the form of a “challenge” to the designers of the world.
As in most design competitions, it would not be surprising to see 5000 designers enter from around the world. Each designer would carefully follow the rules, in many cases pay a FEE of up to perhaps $100 or so and then spend hours carefully and vividly illustrating their novel work, presenting it in the exact form required by the rules of the competition (and the sponsoring company). They would then submit their invention, their design, their intellectual property to so-called “judges” who work with the sponsor to determine select winners. During this process, the sponsoring company has the privilege of inspecting the outcome of perhaps the biggest brainstorm session in the world.
The cost to the company is minimal (pay the judges and award $10,000/ $5,000/$1,000 to the winners). For this small cost, the company gets to see incredibly diverse and innovative concepts from great minds of many parts of the world (ideas that have not be shown before) AND they get the rights to the designs they want AND they don’t have to pay royalties or give the struggling designer any design credit to HIS or HER design, AND they also get free advertisement as a result of being the sponsoring company (it looks like great PR - a win win win for the company).
Are we fools here? I’m surprised all companies don’t tap into this wealth of eager brains. We need to form a union to protect our innovations from the corporate world.
If we don’t win, which is often the case, we don’t even get any constructive criticism from the judges for our fee. So we don’t really learn from the experience (design wise) and honestly, we can’t be certain that the judges even looked at our designs. We often don’t even get a courtesy email to let us know that we didn’t make the next round. I wish there was a better way.
What are your thoughts?
I’d post my own thoughts in the comments section - join in with your views!
Perforated Container Architecture
It’s rather incredible how the details in surface treatment makes all the difference in this prefab container:
In Darmstadt, Germany, The Alice-Hospital vom Roten Kreuz has commissioned Angela Fritsch Architekten to build a pavilion in the park in front of their main building, and the final result is a really creative design. The pavilion was constructed using a conventional system of prefabricated containers. In order to integrate it into the park, the surface finish of the facade is committed to adhering sheeting system patented by Hannes Freising from architectural facade firm Huellwerk. This ZGG pavilion (Zentrum Ganzheitlicher Gesundheit) was to consist of a cheap container box with a wallpaper made out of sheet metal. This golden cover has ornamental leaves cut out of it, making it a shiny and decorative structure in the hospital’s park.
I thought the solution was really elegant - transforming the drab container into 1) a pleasant thing to look at, just like a tree shedding its autumn leaves; 2) fitting into the context of the park; and 3) doing so at a (presumably) very low cost.
[via freshome]
Train that doesn’t need to stop
In the current train system design, the train has to accelerate/decelerate to a complete stop for every station to pick up passengers. The video above shows a very interesting concept for an alternative solution to mass commuter trains - it is a train that doesn’t stop.
Instead of stopping, it’d have a slider carriage on the top of the train. The slider carriage serves as an intermediary ‘pod’ where boarding and alighting passengers transit (before diffusing into the main train carriages). Commuters at the station wishing to board the train would enter the carriage (and presumably at some point before the train actually arrives, the doors are shut). The train seamlessly picks up this carriage, while depositing its own carriage to drop commuters wishing to alight.
Without having to stop for stations, train journeys can be drastically reduced without sacrificing passenger convenience - it is the best of both worlds! I’m definitely not an expert in locomotion engineering, but on the surface it does seem like a possible concept (hey, we’ve sent people onto the Moon!).
A small (social) concern for me might be how effective/efficient can passengers diffuse from the pod into the rest of the carriages. In a system like this, there is even more inertia to venture away from the sliding pod if you’re just hanging on for a few stops, and people are likely to gather in the few carriages nearest the pod. This could however probably be solved by having multiple sliding pods instead of the singular one as visualized in the video.
If you can read Chinese, here’s a more detailed explanation by the inventor Chen Jian Jun. It seems like he’s been working hard trying to pitch his ideas to various agencies (including government, rail etc), but hasn’t been particularly successful.
What are your thoughts on this?
Bomomo Painter
Bomomo is a rather interesting (if awkward) web painting tool - instead of controlling a still cursor as you would in Photoshop and such, the cursor for Bomomo are bouncing, twisting, or moving around. You get a whole series of cursors (seen at the bottom of the screen) with various behaviors; what happens next is probably a mixture of luck and design intuition.
Try it!
The Eco Zoo
The Eco-Zoo is a rather interesting website with a very light-hearted touch to be more environmentally friendly. The topic isn’t what you’d term informative or authoritative, though what I really liked is the Flash execution: whimsical, detailed, delightful and unmistakably Japanese. See it for yourself!
Pulp Branding
Pulp fiction is a niche comic targeted at marketing and perhaps more specifically, graphic branding people. Above are just some excerpts taken out of one of the issues “Logo Reflections” where the artist pondered what would it be like if logos were more a current reflection of the company rather than the (future) projections. Each issue is about 20+ ’slides’, and there are already ten issues!
So, if you’re into logos and branding, head over!
Toy-a-Day
Joe, a talented (graphic artist perhaps?) guy started a a year-long project over at Toy-A-Day recently, where he’d design, construct and post a new paper toy from a basic template each day for one year.
Here are the collections from Day 1 to Day 18 - pretty cool huh? What’s more, some of them are available as down loadable PDFs for your own amusement and handicraft session. With their flat bottoms, they’re perfect for perching on top of your monitor to lift a spirit or two!
Read At Work
Now what did those pictures look like? A really boring and not-to-mention uglily laid-out PowerPoint deck in Windows XP? Perhaps it even resembles what your work computer screen looks like? Perfect! That’s actually a screenshot from Read At Work, a website dedicated to making your sneaky non-work reading as ‘official’ as possible.
When you enter the site, it goes into a fake full-screen Windows mode, with several folders of ‘books’ for you to choose. The texts from these e-books are then churned into pseudo-PowerPoint slides, so you could while away your time reading your classic while appearing to be digesting a colleague’s Powerpoint presentation.
The lengths we go…
Don’t Look at the Gorilla!
There’s probably few designers who can boast of a design brief as unique as this:
On 18 May a gorilla named Bokito escaped from Rotterdam Zoo. During his escape the animal attacked a female visitor, who had frequent eye contact with the animal. This presumably led to the attack, since gorillas do not like direct eye contact. Health insurance company FBTO always offers simple solutions, so the weekend after the escape we distributed more than 2.000 so-called BokitoViewers at the entrance to Rotterdam Zoo.
Now the gorillas will probably be wondering why’s everyone looking in that direction…
Tag Galaxy (Flickr)
Tag Galaxy is a rather weird but interesting way of browsing through Flickr images - probably more for casual browsing than a specific search. You start off with a tag on a topic (which becomes your ‘central planet’) while other related tags appear in your galaxy. You can then click on those related tags and browse photos with both the original tag and the subsequent tag(s) (top picture).
And eventually, when you really do want to look at those photos, you can click on the planet and photos will ‘land’ on the planet (2nd picture).
I thought the visual/cognitive link between the two was a tad too literal and forced, but an interesting interface nonetheless for exploring images in a (pseudo)-3D space (yeah, space).
