Hasta La Ideas

The Core77 Design Awards team just had the opportunity to work with printers extraordinaire, MOO. Their motto is “We love to print” and based on our experience with them, it’s true. We got exactly what we needed; quality business cards for our upcoming 2012 Design Awards without spending an arm and a leg. (p.s. A reminder that the Core77 Design Awards 2012 call for entries opens up on January 17th!!) Their website was full of great and affordable custom printing options. We uploaded our own design and were able to select a full color option on both sides with no additional charge. After a quick and simple process, our cards were on their way to our office!

After ordering, a cute email arrived from “Little MOO” who kept us up to date on the status of the order, where to go with questions or concerns, and when the order shipped. We were impressed with the quality of the card and overall look and feel of the finished product. A set of 50 cards came in a delightful little business card box, complete with two dividing tabs labeled “Mine” and “Theirs” for future storing. The overall aesthetic was charming and thoughtful.

Thanks MOO! We love our cards and we love you.

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The Core77 Design Awards is back and better than ever! Our second annual celebration of design excellence, enterprise and intent is just around the corner so keep us in mind as you finish and file your projects completed in 2011. The call for entries opens on January 17th, 2012 with an earlybird discount that saves 20% on your entry fee!

This year, we’ve added wonderful new categories: Food Design for your edible objects and food systems, Writing and Commentary for criticism and journalism about designed objects, spaces, and processes, and we’ve split last year’s Product Design category into Consumer Products and Equipment.

The Core77 Design Awards is an innovative and celebratory platform for engaging with the design community as well as prospective clients. Our distributed jury teams are composed of design leaders from around the globe so stay tuned for announcements of this year’s Jury Captains and Jury Teams. Award winners will receive great exposure here and through our network, a spot in our awards publication and, of course, the sweet C77DA trophy that acknowledges collaboration.

So mark January 17, 2012 in your calendars! Ready your projects from 2011, and be a part of the most amazing and inclusive celebration of design. Visit the Awards site for the full 17-category menu!

Eligible submissions must have been launched, published or completed in 2011 and must have been produced (aka real), unless you’re entering into the Speculative category or entering in a Student field.

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Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year’s Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

James Tichenor, Joshua Walton, David Rockwell and Tucker Viemeister
Photo by Blandon Belushin/Rockwell Group

Designer: The LAB at Rockwell Group
Location: New York, NY, USA
Category: Interactive / Web / Mobile
Award: Notable

Plug-In-Play

Plug-In-Play is an interactive installation consisting of an architectural scale projection and a series of networked input platforms representing a playful take on the future of the connected city. It was the central installation of the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, CA by the LAB at Rockwell Group.

Plug-In-Play was a response to the theme of the 2010 01SJ Biennial: “Build Your Own World.” This theme is predicated on the notion that innovative individuals worldwide can make a difference by building unique and distributed city-wide platforms for creative solutions and public engagement.

The Rockwell Group digital interaction LAB took this theme as a challenge to show the growing connection between the physical and virtual in urban life, and to explore the role this connection plays in shaping the cities of tomorrow.

The second challenge that we faced involved the site itself, Richard Meier & Partners Architects’ San Jose City Hall. The large, iconic site provided both a practical as well as conceptual challenge: how were we to address such a large and unique site, and how could our installation meaningfully address the location as a civic space?

Thus, the problem we set out for ourselves was to acknowledge and explore the growing role of technology within the context of civic space and to do so in a way that both activated the architectural space and created a physical link to the virtual world.

Core77: What’s the latest news or development with your project?

We have used Plug-In-Play’s underlying technology on a number of recent projects to allow physical objects to communicate to virtual ones. And we are really excited to be talking to several cities right now to bring the idea of an interactive projection with physical inputs to a permanent location. This next project will act as a platform for artists and designers to explore urban scale interactive projections without having to rebuild the hardware and software each time. We are really grateful that the city of San Jose and Zero1 gave us the opportunity to explore the ideas of interactive civic space.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?

Among the most important lessons learned on this project was about the challenges of scale. Despite all of the technical hurdles that we bridged to allow all the sensors and web technologies to talk to each other, one of the largest challenges turned out to be physically blocking the windows for projection, given our small budget and due to the project’s large scale.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

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Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year’s Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

Designer: Randy Sarafan
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Category: DIY / Hack / Mod
Award: Notable

Simple Bots

Simple Bots are a series of robot tutorials posted online with the intent of making robotics accessible to all.

Simple Bots were created to enable anyone with the inclination to get started in basic robotics and mechanical engineering. My goal was to make the bots simple enough that anyone within reason could understand them, locate the parts and reproduce them. In this way, Simple Bots could serve as a stepping stone into more complicated engineering projects as it introduces many of the fundamentals in a simple hands-on way.
With the increasing cultural dialogue about giving children a more solid understanding of science and engineering, the need for quality introductory material is increasingly valuable. It is one thing to talk about teaching science and engineering to children and another thing entirely to teach it to them. Unfortunately, most parents don’t have a background in science and engineering and most of the learning material about it is difficult and convoluted. The nice thing about Simple Bots is that it makes it easy enough for both the parents and the children to easily follow and learn in a hands-on manner.

Core77: What’s the latest news or development with your project?

I have decided to turn it into an eBook and am nearly done. I have completed 18 new Simple Bots, and hope to see it available online by the end of the year.

What is 1 quick anecdote about your project?

The first bot I completed was Rolly Bot. I showed it to my friends who were mildly impressed, but not entirely convinced. So, I set out to win them over. Next I made Walker Bot our of the old telephone and again showed it to my friends. After that, no one doubted this was a good idea. From there, I kept going.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

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Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year’s Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

Designer: Stiven Kerestegian in co-creation with artisans in the Patagonia
Location: Puerto Varas, Chile
Category: Design for Social Impact
Award: Notable

Chilote House Shoe

This simple, noble, extremely comfortable and highly sustainable indoor shoe redefines the concepts of inclusive design and conscious consumption through the synergy created by three valuable assets; design guided craftsmanship, noble renewable materials from the Patagonia, and a disruptive collaboration and manufacturing process.

From the very beginning we understood that we needed to deliver more than just a highly desirable and commercially viable product, we needed to create value for everyone involved in the products complete life cycle.

We set out to design a model that truly contributed by creating measurable positive social impact in the lives of the artisans that provide the craftsmanship, it being the soul of the product.

From this point of view, a great design would not be enough, we needed a highly innovative ecosystem around it that was not only highly inclusive socially but also completely environmentally benign. We wanted to focus on the less addressed and more challenging aspects of sustainability.

The product addresses the interest of all the individuals involved in synergy; the intended market and it’s consumers, the local and global environment and all the individuals who are involved in it’s manufacturing model.

Core77: How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

I learned that I had been recognized by Core77 from my colleagues from the Innovation Center of Un Techo para Chile. It’s just a coincidence, but they received the same Core recognition with their “Safe Agua” project in collaboration with Art Center’s Designmatters.

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

The product is creating much unexpected buzz at a local level here in the south of Chile, we are contacted almost daily by artisans from all the surrounding areas wanting to participate in the production model. Same at the opposite side of our operation with our target retailers; museum stores, eco-premium boutiques and on-line sales. Quite a bit of buzz all around… things are pretty crazy right now.

Also we had an amazing launch in NYC at the NYIGF where we received several recognitions among tens of thousands of products at the show including winning the “Eco-Choice Award for most sensitive use of Material” a visitor voted award…

We have sold most of our production capacity (limited to just 1000 units per month due to our highly inclusive [far beyond fair trade] production methodology). We plan to duplicate the production in the next 6 months…

We just launched a great new website www.chiloteshoes.com: another nice upgrade is our inclusion of QR codes with each pair of Chilotes—when scanned, the code leads to a mini-site that features the personal and geographical information of the actual artisans that crafted that piece.

What is 1 quick anecdote about your project?

Interesting fact: I designed the Chilote Shoe in about 1/2 an hour (with many iterations since but the concept itself came out pretty fast). Of course, all the insights, material research, cultural learnings, etc. that came before and lead to the design was a very long process.

Everything that came after was even more laborious and challenging including the most important aspects such as the inclusive manufacturing process and especially all the social interaction elements, the relationships that are inherently developed are truly rewarding. We had to create a socially sustainable model from scratch, a model designed to meet the local socio-cultural reality and at the same time address and deliver on the global consumer trends and desires.

It’s extremely difficult to think globally and act locally especially in a location so remote as the Patagonia. It is also very challenging to create a product and brand eco-system without a large company (and the associated resources) behind you. We basically started from scratch in every aspect.

It’s been a long 2-3 years of work leading up to the US launch last weeks, but the actual product design was a breeze and very enjoyable.

When asked about the Chilote, I always talk more about what is around the product (it’s ecosystem), the people and places and materials involved more that the product itself asI feel it speaks for itself. Sure it’s cute, super comfortable and sports highly innovative materials in a functional and useful product, but I believe that the most interesting quality of the design is the “story” around it. Not to sound overly artsie but I do really think it’s a conversation piece!

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

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