Hasta La Ideas

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: Clean Team
• Designers: IDEO.org + Unilever and Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP)

Clean Team is an affordable in-home sanitation system in Ghana that offers residents an alternative to unsanitary public latrines. Essentially, a portable toilet is delivered to customer homes and serviced three times a week. Families pay on an incremental basis.

– How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

Clean Team was notified that we had been recognized for the Core77 Design Awards from IDEO.org’s marketing and communications team.

– What’s the latest news or development with your project?

Clean Team is rapidly scaling in Kumasi since the end of the pilot, with another 120 new Clean Team toilets installed just in the past month of July. The business has recently received a shipment of 1,000 new toilets and plans to have at least 1,000 total installed in homes by the end of the year, reaching out and providing improved sanitation solutions to over 7,000 Ghanaians. With scale, Clean Team is proud to maintain a positive customer experience. In the words of one of our clients: “Clean Team is hygienic, ensures privacy, safe and has provided me something to be boastful about as these days it is the only predictable and dependable service I get.”

– What is one quick anecdote about your project?

When it came for prototyping, the IDEO.org design team arrived in Kumasi to test four toilet prototypes. Industrial designer, Danny Alexander, explains that “one of our concepts going into prototyping was a water flush toilet, similar to a high-end camping toilet. It had been the clear favorite in the drawings we shared earlier in the process. When we brought prototypes to the field, though, we realized very quickly that water flush toilets would do more harm than good.”

After leaving water-flush and non-flush toilet prototypes in user’s homes for a few nights, the team returned to check on the toilets. “All the water-flush toilets had overflowed–what a disaster!” Between that, the complexity of use, the lower capacity of the tank, and the need to use expensive water to flush their waste, users of water-flush toilets unanimously rejected them. Everyone wanted the simplicity of non-flush toilets. Had we not physically tested the toilet prototypes with users, though, we would have thought water-flush toilets were the answer!

– What was an “a-ha” moment from this project?

During the design process, WSUP, Unilever, and IDEO.org were driven by the fundamental belief that every family deserves a toilet. This project was as much about providing dignity as it was about providing clean sanitation for our clients. So one of our biggest a-ha moments came when thinking about our branding and business design strategy. Seeing as our product provided dignity for families, our brand had to follow suit. For this reason, Clean Team’s business design was heavily structured around the strength of its service—following through with promises in a professional manner and making people the cornerstone of the design. To achieve this, we found that an important part of business development would entail Clean Team making an often stigmatized and undesirable job into an esteemed profession.

View the full project here.

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FF Mark Regular

When was the last time you had some proper fun trying out a typeface online? FontFont‘s new FF Mark is not only a lovely geometric sans but you can really test it out on its own dedicated microsite…

FF Mark Black Italic

It’s not the first time FontFont has made a site for a single typeface – in 2008, for example, it launched metaserif.com, a dedicated site for the then new counterpart to Erik Spiekermann’s classic FF Meta.

But as well as expertly displaying the capabilities of FF Mark, ffmark.com shows how much the internet has changed in that short time – the new microsite is unlike any online type sampler I’ve played around with.

FF Mark Heavy Italic

FF Mark Light

While it details the history of the design of this contemporary take on the geometric face, it also offers an intelligent way of trying out the font, in all its weights, in different colours and backgrounds.

Users can tweak the size and leading on-screen (as above), type their own text in and manipulate it, even see how some example texts might look across a range of media such as a book cover, an inside spread or poster (see second image from bottom of post).

A brief history of Erbar-Grotesk (1926)

FF Mark is billed as “ze new Germanetric sans” and is the result of a joint project between type designer Hannes von Döhren (of HVD Fonts), FontFont’s Christoph Koeberlin and the company’s Type Department, with creative support from Erik Spiekermann.

Thin compared with Heavy (overlayed)

The microsite also includes some full screen video (featuring typographers) and a history of the geometric sans in Germany, focusing on Universal-Schrift (1925), Erbar-Grotesk (1926), Futura (1927), Kabel (1928), Berthold Grotesk (1928), and Neuzeit-Grotesk (1930).

It’s a great way to showcase this contemporary version of a German classic. Have some fun at ffmark.com.

London Design Festival 2013: London product designer and co-founder of OKAYstudio Mathias Hahn has designed a range of opaline glassware.

Mathias Hahn‘s new Louche glassware collection features an opaque white water bottle with a grey stopper, a tall mint-green glass beaker and a small transparent beaker with a green lid.

Hahn said that this experimental glassware range aimed to expose opaline or opaque glass qualities to a younger and contemporary audience.

The glassware has different grades of opacity that are created by hand-blowing opaline glass into changing wall thicknesses. “By using a subtle set of monochrome colours, the often very decorative use of opaque glass is transferred into refined and plain objects,” explained Hahn.

“The louche [name] describes a very similar visual condition, when spirits such as absinthe or pastis turn from clear to cloudy when adding water,” Hahn said.

Mathias Hahn started his own design studio in 2006 and is one of the founding members of design collective OKAYstudio. The Louche glassware will be on display until 22 September as part of OKAYstudio’s Loose Thread exhibition at Ben Sherman’s Modular Blanc exhibition space in London at 108 Commercial Street, London, E1 6LZ.

Other projects by Hahn’s that we’ve featured on Dezeen include a set of mirrors with wooden handles that swivel up and down and a collection of coloured glass vessels that feature concrete, brass and metal. See all our coverage on Mathias Hahn »

Other ceramics featured on Dezeen recently include a new collection of bone china plates with a sandy texture and a small ceramic pendant that bounces light off of large steel bowls.

See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »
See Dezeen’s map and guide to London Design Festival 2013 »

Photographs are courtesy of the designer.

The post Louche glassware
by Mathias Hahn appeared first on Dezeen.

Archtober is nearly upon us, and the designtastic autumnal fun gets off to an urbane start with City Modern, celebrating the best in New York design and architecture. Now in its second year, the collaboration between Dwell Media and New York magazine kicks off next Friday with a Meet the Architects celebration, followed by a weekend of City Modern home tours in Manhattan and Brooklyn (the one pictured at right is “Skyhouse,” a project by architect David Hotson and interior designer Ghislaine Viñas that occupies a previously vacant four-story penthouse at the summit of one of the oldest surviving skyscrapers in NYC). The week continues with programming led by New York design editor Wendy Goodman and Dwell editor-in-chief Amanda Dameron, including a sure-to-be-stimulating conversation among Paola Antonelli of MoMA, the one and only Michael Bierut, and architecture critic Justin Davidson about “What Design can Do For New York City.” Get the full scoop on all eight event-packed days here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This is the eighth post in our interview series with ten influential I.D. curators, retailers and creative directors. Yesterday, we talked to Herman Miller’s Gary Smith.

David Alhadeff opened The Future Perfect ten years ago on a quiet corner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with the intention of providing a platform for local designers to show and sell their work. Channeling his love of architecture, interiors, art history, industrial design and graphic design, Alhadeff’s storefront and his tightly edited selection of furniture and housewares put Brooklyn design on the map. The Future Perfect has since expanded beyond its modest roots, with locations in Manhattan and San Francisco and designs from all parts of the world, yet Alhadeff continues to champion emerging designers and maintain TFP’s integral sense of community.

How do you find about new designers?

I travel and visit trade fairs, and I do some amount of scouring in magazines and on the Internet. I sometimes find that to be a little disheartening. In terms of editing and curating a retail environment, I have to think about stuff being in the store for a very long time. With a magazine or Internet article, I can get swept up in the story, and sometimes I’m getting swept up for the wrong reasons. So it can be the wrong place for me to learn about something new. But I like The World of Interiors and Elle Decoration UK, and I’ve started looking at Elle Decor US as well. Online, I look at Dwell, Core77, Designboom, Highsnobiety, NOTCOT.

I also find out about a lot of designers through referrals. Friends, clients that we work with, interior designers, and photographers—they come into contact with the product in a very different way than we do, and oftentimes have an opportunity to see things that just aren’t going to be in stores. The photographers and the stylists are an interesting group of people that I listen to very closely. They’re curating in their own way, so they get it.

I always go to Milan to the Salone, and I started visiting the London Design Festival on a yearly basis as well. I make trips to international and domestic partners that we work with, and I try to do a trip every year someplace I haven’t visited to get into a local community and do studio visits. This year I’m going to Tokyo.

The last way would be through people who submit their work. We don’t have time to respond to every submission, but we look at every one. We do find diamonds in the rough.

Inside The Future Perfect’s Manhattan store

What kinds of design are you looking for at the moment?

I’m looking more at designer talent. It isn’t necessarily collections to purchase; it’s people to collaborate with. We launched our in-house collection last May and we’re continuing to expand that. So for me it’s more about looking at broader talent bases. I’ve always considered The Future Perfect to be about the relationships I have with the people, and the makers I work with. That defines what we do here.

I will say, there’s a certain type of design that’s happening now. There’s a return to craft along with the accessibility of new types of machinery and technology. It’s pushing design in two different directions, but they are merging and converging. For example, people are having parts machine-made but then using them in forms that are super organic and beautiful. This is something that’s new and fresh. What I’m seeing in our community—or with the designers we work with, at least—is a use of the two in combination. A lot of it is just about accessibility. These machines have been around for a while but young, emerging designers just starting out haven’t had access to them. On the flip side, there are things that are just entirely crafted. Piet Hein Eek‘s work, for example.

The Future Perfect will begin carrying Justine Ashbee’s Native Line weavings this fall.

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