Design students: if your school doesn't have one of these, push for it! Housewares manufacturer Umbra regularly sponsors a design competition at Pratt where winners can actually earn royalties, the financial dream of many a post-grad designer, with winning designs.
This year's winners have just been announced; click here for the glory details.
The cocktail umbrella: Does it really do anything? It definitely opens and closes like a real umbrella, so it seems the dead-end functional charm of the miniature rain shield has single-handedly managed to keep it alive over the years. In celebration of this long summer weekend, we leave you with a tribute to the cocktail umbrella.
This rogue ad effort for a party store cleverly makes use for those nasty subway grate, passing-train blasts of air. Great tag line: "Surprise Party Specialists," which is perfectly nice until an unsuspecting jittery person suffers a heart attack or, more realistically, until those streamers turn black (we're guessing about 10 minutes in NYC).
Ahh the elusive flexible display, an all-time ID student favorite. We're no longer asking "what" but "when," as in "when will Sony be implementing its sweet new flexible, full-color OLED TFT display technology?" Apparently, there are plans to launch a new line of miniature TVs later this year with next-generation flat-panel OLEDs in the works. Overall, Sony will use these developments to achieve slimmer, lighter, and more flexible devices.
Next Tuesday, AIGA/NY is presenting a great event looking at graphic design through the eyes of three designers: Stefan Bucher (Daily Monster), Eric Rodenbeck (Mappr), and Katie Salen (Karaoke Ice)--all moderated by Ze Frank. Here's the pitch:
In a user-centric world where Nike iD, Flickr and YouTube rule the roost, this trio has kept pace, designing not just for but with their audiences. Playing with the notion of designer as visual storyteller, they craft conversations where their viewers are suddenly participants. See how each of them has redefined that joyous, contentious relationship between design and its consumers in a variety of mediums.
In two weeks (Friday June 8 & Saturday June 9) the Japan Society in New York will be hosting a two-day symposium on design and technology in Japan. The line up is great, featuring presenters from Toyota, Motorola, Panasonic, WIRED, Harvard Business School and others. The event will include a healthy dose of robotics, including a concert by a robotic orchestra. The best part is that Core77 readers can get FREE tickets. To do so email Ryohei (ryamamoto-at-japansociety.org) and simply ask for the ticket. The first 20 respondents get them.
The event is part of Tech Epoch - an 11-day summit showcasing Japan's technological innovation, with interactive demonstrations, cutting-edge robotics, innovative automotives, multimedia performances, lectures, symposia, and family and student workshops. Various events are taking place throughout NYC in the first two weeks of June.
Klaus Rosburg of Sonic Design has created the Capitol Light, a miniature version of the original. Scaled down from 165 feet to 165 millimeters, this charming gesture "brings not only humor, but also light to todays world politics." Bonus plug for all: Cimquest offered a complimentary print on their Dimension 3D printer during this past week's symposium; Klaus picked up the lamp part right there and then!
Photo: The Megatherium Skeleton includes some key fossils supplied by Darwin and shows how his earliest research helped to further the programme of natural theological science
The Darwin Correspondence Project has a new web site. The main feature of the site is an online database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.
Enjoy this historic footprint of design in the first new major content area on Darwin and design in nature with a list of letters that discuss design in nature. For instance, with letters between Charles Darwin and the Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley (a strong supporter of Darwin and a proponent of design) and letters discussing work by the Scottish statesman George Douglas Campbell, the duke of Argyll, an advocate of design and a leading critic of Darwin.
When (or if) you think about innovation within the chemicals industry, names like DuPont, Dow Chemical or maybe a big conglomerate like GE come to mind. But did you know that the relatively tiny Eastman Chemical Company (not to be confused with Eastman Kodak) has put together a state-of-the-art innovation and design site featuring conversations and interviews with leading innovators that the company is calling A Smorgasbord of Ideas:
"The Eastman Innovation Lab isn't your every day corporate website; it's an unconventional, sometimes irreverent (but always relevant) resource for designers. That's why we interview some of the design world's most creative and influential thinkers - you can listen to their opinions, and not ours. Designers, brand owners and educators - people who look at the world differently - help us bring you a smorgasbord of ideas. Some of them use Eastman materials; some do not. That's not as important as what they know, and what they have to say.From Yves Béhar, founder of the San Francisco design firm, fuseproject, and storyteller extraordinaire, to Marc Rosen, renowned cosmetics packaging designer, to Robyn Waters, author of "The Trendmaster's Guide", we offer an eclectic mix of viewpoints from people we respect and you'll enjoy... The menu is constantly evolving and expanding. So stop by our smorgasbord often and check out what's new. Watch out for the pickled herring."
Be sure to check out the "intricately curvaceous" POM Wonderful bottle with an "ergonomically correct" handle, made to resemble three pomegranates stacked one on top of the other.
Talk about complicated! Here's a pretty awesome photo essay on how they put all the components together for a Space Shuttle launch. Just getting the thing onto the launchpad takes up to eight hours.
Volkswagen has put up an element on their German website called the "Tiguan Base," where you can see the development of their new Tiguan auto concept, from early sketches right up to the real thing.
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