Hasta La Ideas

The iF Design Award has been consistently hand-picking the best, most innovative designs since 1953, honoring top-class achievements in categories spanning Product Design, Communication Design, Packaging, Service Design, Architecture, Interior Architecture, and UI and UX for 67 years in a row. The entire iF Design Award program saw as many as 10,000 submissions this year, which were evaluated by 98 international design experts from 21 countries, on the iF Jury.

Just this year alone, 1,744 designs received the iF Design Award for their creative accomplishments across various categories, while an additional 75 designs went on to win the highly-coveted iF gold award for their outstanding work. The iF Design Award always culminates in a grand ceremony in Berlin, although owing to the pandemic and global travel restrictions, award-winning products and projects this year are being celebrated digitally with an international content campaign encapsulated by the slogan “The CreatiFe Power of Design” in cooperation with renowned design platforms and seven renowned design museums.

Over the course of the next few months, Yanko Design will be curating and featuring winning designs from this year’s program too – we’ve hand-picked seven award-winning designs from the Bicycling category below! All the iF Design Award winners can also be viewed on the newly-launched iF Design App that gives you access to a grand database of award-winning design projects and their creators, right at your fingertips!

To view all these designs and many more, visit the website of the iF DESIGN AWARD.

Click Here to download the brand new iF Design App – a new experience in discovering outstanding designs

Award-Winning Bicycles and Travel-gear from the iF Design Award 2021

Halfway Folding Bicycle by Giant Co. Ltd. (iF gold award Winner)

The iF gold award-winning Halfway bicycle solves every commuter’s biggest headache – carrying their cycle on public transit or into buildings. Its unique folding mechanism allows the entire bicycle to pack up into a hand-pulled strolley that you can easily wheel around with you. The bicycle even comes with its own front-basket for storing your bag while cycling, and caster-wheels on the basket allow the cycle to be rolled around when completely folded! “The term Halfway refers to the folding system of the bicycle – utilizing a single-sided fork and chain-stay which equates to a more compact enclosure size. The auto-lock system provides fewer steps for folding and introduces a new level of safety while riding”, mentions the Chinese design studio and creator behind the Halfway, Giant Co. Ltd.

Litelok Go Flexi-U by Prof. Neil Barron for LITELOK

Litelok Go Flexi-U is the world’s first insurance-rated, flexible U-lock for bikes. Unlike conventional U-locks that come with a rigid design, the Go Flexi-U sports a flexible design that can easily wrap around poles, fences, and other objects. It matches the strength and durability of traditional U-locks while being incredibly lightweight (641 grams). Moreover, it easily straps to your bike’s frame, making it rather easy to carry around with you as you ride!

Gmigo One by Baron Design Studio and Tianjin Jidian Road Technology Co. Ltd.

Designed to be a smart, modular scooter for urban commuting, the Gmigo One comes with a shape-shifting design that allows you to alternate between sitting and standing scooter designs just by plugging in different modules into the scooter’s unique frontal frame. The minimal design and Stormtrooper color-way forms a perfect foreground against the urban backdrop, and the small wheels are perfect for in-city commute. The scooter’s easily detachable hub makes the folded volume smaller and easy to store, and the magnesium alloy die-cast body helps dramatically reduce the scooter’s overall weight.

Canyon Fix 3-in-1 Minitool by Canyon Bicycles

Don’t let its unseemingly tiny design fool you, Canyon’s Fix 3-in-1 tool houses a veritable bicycle-fixing tool-shop in a compact yet extremely versatile form factor. Combining 3 tools into 1 small, light mini-tool, it features a ratchet with 4 double-sided bits, a Dynaplug® tool to fix punctures on tubeless tires, and a CO2 inflator to pump up flats. With a CNC-milled aluminum body, it weighs just 45g yet can deliver up to 30 Nm of torque, helping you pull apart your cycle and fix it together with no fuss. Plus, it’s about the size of your finger, so you can easily stash it anywhere while riding.

Canyon Speedmax by Artefakt Design for Canyon Bicycles

From the makers of the 3-in-1 minitool also comes the Speedmax, an incredibly capable bike designed to dominate triathlons. By providing more configuration options, optimized aerodynamics, even more innovative integration solutions, and storage spaces with a more streamlined design, the bike was built to give the triathlete every possible performance advantage. Canyon also worked hand-in-hand with Artefakt, a German-based design studio that played an instrumental role in developing the Speedmax series ever since its debut in 2010.

Thule RoundTrip Bike Duffel by Thule Group

Designed by the popular Swiss-based outdoor and transportation gear company, the Thule RoundTrip Bike Duffel is nothing short of a bike-gear-locker that you can carry with you. Designed on the format of popular camera-gear bags, the RoundTrip Bike Duffel comes purpose-built for dedicated cyclists, with a structured, organized interior that provides dedicated storage spaces for clothes, accessories, and EDC. Designed with individual cell pockets, tarpaulin-lined zippered pockets and a toolbox structure to easily see and access items, the Thule RoundTrip Bike Duffel is the perfect travel companion as you’re cycling, allowing you to easily access clothes, bike-repairing gear, or even your camera equipment when you’re outdoors!

FORE_Bicycle by GK Kyoto Inc. and GK Design Soken Hiroshima Inc.

Envisioned as a bicycle that’s designed for everyone, the FORE_Bicycle takes on the format of a scooter, with a minimal U-shaped frame that lets even women ride it while wearing skirts. The bike comes with a nude silver aesthetic that feels natural and allows it to easily blend into environments and boasts of a unique chainless format that makes it easier to maintain. The chainless design also eliminates the stress of getting grease on your clothes, or worse, getting your clothes caught in the chainlinks. By adopting this new foolproof format, the FORE_Bicycle improves the cycling experience, making it safer and much more hassle-free for everyone who rides it!

To view all these designs and many more, visit the website of the iF DESIGN AWARD.

Setting up camp has never looked so good and it setting up a minimal glamping cabin just got a whole lot easier thanks to Den! The cabin design studio has a range of flat-packed DIY-style kits that let you assemble your own A-frame cabin in a few days.

The average size is 115-square-foot (10.68-square-metre) with models that are larger and smaller depending on what you are looking for. Once assembled, you can see the slanted wooden walls and a floor-to-ceiling triangular window just like how we drew a picture of a cabin as children. The space is minimal and can be transformed into a cozy getaway, a yoga studio, or a creative retreat! The prefab pieces for the cabin are made in New York and come with pre-drilled holes, all wooden structural parts that lock together, bolts, and even door hardware. They are super easy to assemble and the details make the cabin stand out from other flat-packed structures. It is well insulated and can be set up wherever your heart desires. Even though it is a semi-permanent shelter, it has all-season compatibility.

“Under the hood (roof) we have components that are cut with CNC precision, a design that slots together intuitively, and a kit so complete even the door hardware is included so you won’t need to make any trips to the hardware store. The cabin bolts and screws together and all the holes are pre-drilled for fast assembly,” explained the Den team. “If you don’t have any construction experience you can certainly make up for it with tenacity, and a few friends to help you with the job,” Den explained. “Building something even as easy as this still requires some hutzpah mind you. You need to be comfortable on a ladder a story off the ground to set the ridge cap and screw in the roofing panels, and you and your friends (or team) need to be careful with the large windows while setting them in place,” they added.

Den’s cabin kit is designed to be assembled with minimal equipment including a ratchet set, a power drill, a ladder, step ladder and a staple gun. The flat-packed materials arrive stacked according to the order in which they are needed which makes the process stress-free and less confusing. You don’t need to have construction experience, just some friends and enthusiasm for this project! Although you might need a contractor to help you out in bolstering the cabin if it is being built on a sloped site or any area with harsh weather conditions to make sure the foundation is solid. The cabin is made such that it touches the ground lightly so it can be disassembled and rebuilt elsewhere easily. That is also a reason why it is designed to be constructed without nails!

Designer: Den

Dezeen has teamed up with Braun to present a three-episode masterclass series with British designer Ilse Crawford, which aims to mark 100 years of the German design brand by inspiring “good design for a better future”.

Called Good Design Masterclass, Braun produced the online series to showcase the three core design principles that it believes creates good design: “simple, useful and built to last”.

In the masterclass, Crawford discusses how these three principles can be applied to the current design industry to inspire both young designers to shape the products of tomorrow, and for us all to embrace good design in our day-to-day lives.

Over the coming weeks, Dezeen will publish each of the three masterclass episodes, which are also available to watch on Braun’s website.

Each masterclass explores how design can “make life better for society and the environment,” according to the brand.

“As the founding editor of Elle Decoration UK, Ilse has cultivated a reputation for empathetic designs that integrate both the functional and useful,” said Braun. “She founded her eponymous multi-discipline design house Studioilse in 2001 and has led respected projects such as New York’s Soho House.”

The series starts by discussing Braun’s first principle – simple. It explores how “good design” should almost be “invisible” yet clear to understand.

“Examples include the essentiality of the U-bend toilet (1775) by Alexander Cummings or even the spoon,” said Braun.

The second episode considers how design is “useful” and highlights that “design at its base level is a tool to provide sometimes profound solutions for real needs,” according to the brand.

In this episode, Ilse references VanMoof’s S3 bike and Össur’s i-Limb Quantum robotic prosthetic hand (2020).

The final episode focuses on designs that are built to last. Ilse examines durability and how products can be engineered to last, focusing on the plastic Melting Pot Table Multichrome from Dirk Van Der Kooij (2017), the Braun T3 radio designed by Dieter Rams and the Ulm School of Design (1958).

To find out more about the Good Design Masterclass, please visit Braun’s website.

Dezeen x Braun Good Design Masterclass

This article was written by Dezeen for Braun as part of our Dezeen x Braun Good Design Masterclass partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Braun marks its centenary with Good Design Masterclass by Ilse Crawford appeared first on Dezeen.

NASA’s 1989 Clean Air Study ascertained that certain plants act as an effective natural filter and remove organic pollutants from the air in enclosed spaces. To counter the effects of reduced ventilation in buildings at the time, and the lack of fresh air in this abodes, researchers documented the percentage of chemicals (like formaldehyde) that were naturally removed from sealed spaces within 24-hour periods by plants. 18 of them—including the pothos plant, aloe vera, peace lily, heartleaf philodendron, red-edged dracaena and weeping fig—proved most effective. See the full list at designboom.

Image courtesy of The Sill

All established automakers have definitely asked their design teams: How should the design of a car change when a driver is no longer required?

It takes a startup, however, to ask the question: How should the design of a car change when it drives itself—and it’s not meant to carry people at all?

Nuro‘s answer has already been rolling around on the streets of Houston. The startup is in the business of last-mile delivery—ideally in underserved areas, the company says—and reckons the best way to get goods to people is to save people as much of the trip as possible. “It’s time for robots to do the driving,” the company writes. “Our custom autonomous delivery vehicles are designed to drive in neighborhoods. And because they only carry goods, they prioritize the safety of others. It’s a safer, smarter approach to everyday errands.”

In April the Nuro R2 began delivering Domino’s pizzas to select customers in Houston, after exhaustively mapping the test neighborhoods with a fleet of instrument-riddled Priuses. Now they’ve announced a partnership with FedEx, who has committed to using a fleet of Nuro’s deliverybots (which are electric, by the way). The eventual goal is to grow that fleet “to a scale that will be transformative for logistics and for everyday life,” writes Dave Ferguson, Nuro’s Co-Founder.

Back to the design of the R2 itself. It can’t be a coincidence that it shares its name with a certain friendly robot, and like R2-D2, Nuro’s vehicle is electric. (I always assumed R2-D2 was electric, you never see Luke pouring gas into him.) And by looking at the R2, we can guess at least two things the designers were thinking:

It’s got to be friendly-looking. This is a new type of vehicle and we don’t want it freaking people out.

Thus the form of the R2 has no caffeinated-CAD-jockey creases, brutal surface changes, zigzags or pointy bits. The body style is rounded, soft-looking, gentle even. No angry, slit-like LED headlights, but old-school round ones, like on a VW bug. An expansive windshield, even if no human is looking out of it, as if to say “Relax, I’m obviously a car-like object, you’ve seen stuff like me before.”

There’s no reason the thing needs to be car-sized.

Since the designers decided—presumably for safety reasons—to have the packages only accessible from the curb-side of a two-way street, there are only doors on one side. And you don’t want delivery recipients having to lean into the vehicle and reach across the entire width of a car to get at a package in the back. Thus the R2 is accessibly narrow, which I feel is good UX design. And the gullwing doors are a nice touch as well, admitting plenty of natural light, revealing both the packages and the friendly teal color within. There’s no ducking and having to reach into the dark space of an unknown vehicle.

The company doesn’t actually say much about the design, but does confirm that “We designed it differently on purpose,” on their website. “When we founded Nuro, we set out to build a new class of vehicle designed purely for transporting things instead of people. We wanted to build a self-driving vehicle, but not just a driver-less vehicle—a passenger-less vehicle, too.

“We were convinced that this kind of vehicle had the potential to be safer than passenger vehicles: more nimble, narrower, and better able to prioritize the well-being of other road users. And by building such a vehicle, we could also lower vehicle cost, improve the customer experience, and accelerate autonomous technology deployment by solving problems jointly through both hardware and software development.”

In terms of safety, it’s worth noting that with no passengers to worry about jostling, the R2 can slam on its brakes as hard as it wants. “R2 can come to a quick emergency stop when necessary without concern for the groceries, pizza, or other items onboard,” the companys says. “But rest assured: if your pizza gets damaged along the way, we’ll make sure to send another one without delay.”