Hasta La Ideas

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 Credit: Blandon Belushin/Rockwell Group

Designer: Rockwell Group & The LAB
Location: New York, NY, USA
Category: Interiors / Exhibition
Award: Runner-Up

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

The West Lobby is a kinetic space, centered around 8 giant central columns wrapped with mirrors and LCD screens. We installed 384 displays on the columns and 26 behind the registration desk to create a platform for a variety of customized immersive digital experiences in the space.

For the West Lobby, we created our first large-scale implementation of our Environmental Choreography System. This involved creating a series of hardware and software prototypes, testing the resolution, and stress-testing the synchronizing the 64 computers we used to power the installation.

We created a scale mock-up in-house to test content. Because of the overwhelming size and amount of displays and computers, this process also included months of on-site testing with the actual columns. All the content we developed had to be custom tailored to the environment, the colors had to be adjusted to amplify the mirror element, the pace and scale of all moving elements had to be finely tuned to create a dimensional, active environment.

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

The project was built as a platform and we are really proud that work continues to be produced for it. The LAB at Rockwell Group, Digital Kitchen and the Art Production Fund have all produced a number of amazing digital experiences for the columns that have shown us a number of new ways to see the West Lobby itself. And it was very exciting to see Casey Reas’ work on the columns as a generative artwork on such a large canvas.

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: The Exploratorium– Mike Petrich, Karen Wilkinson, Walter Kitundu, Luigi Anzivino, Ryan Jenkins, Bronwyn Bevan
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Category: Design Education Initiatives
Award: Notable

The Tinkering Studio

The Tinkering Studio is a public space at the Exploratorium to support the creative ideas of visitors, collaborators, and staff. It is a place to explore science, art, and design in meaningful ways—based on personal ideas, questions, and explorations—enabling everyone to build a new understanding of the world.

The Tinkering Studio is based on a constructionist theory of learning which asserts that knowledge is not simply transmitted from teacher to learner, but actively constructed by the mind of the learner. Constructionism suggests that learners are more likely to make new ideas while actively engaged in making an external artifact. The Tinkering Studio supports the construction of knowledge within the context of designing and building personally meaningful artifacts. We create opportunities for people to “think with their hands” in order to construct meaning and understanding.

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

We projected the webcast of the award ceremony in our prototyping space and gathered as a team to watch. It was very exciting to even be nominated, let alone receive a notable mention among so many other great projects!

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

We have been experimenting with ways of using home-made play-doh to play around with electrical circuits and LED lights. Inspired by the work of AnnMarie Thomas, we’ve taken that idea and run with it. You can check out a short video of our experiments here.

Also, we’re in the very early stages of developing a paper pop-up workshop that incorporates structural paper-craft elements and, again, electrical circuitry, switches, and lights. Some very early work can be seen here.

Recently we’ve tried making our own popsicles to find out what happens when you lick it while passing electrical current through the ice… No joke!

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

(more…)

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

FEATURE PICTURE

Designers: Fristad, Susan Huang, Ahmed Riaz, Eric Dorf and Mon Vorratnchaiphan
Location: Mountain View, CA, USA
Category: Strategy/Research
Award: Student Winner

Design Play

Design Play is Design Thinking for children. It is an open-ended, foundational creative framework that builds on what children already do as they play. As they imagine, create and collaborate with others, Design Play helps kids understand they can influence their environment. Their empowerment leads to change in their environment and beyond.

The intent was to develop an offering that in no way interfered with educators’ existing curriculum. A major finding during our primary research was that educators were open to new material, but that it must supplement and not supplant existing content.

Thus we hoped to design an easily memorable framework that could take shape in any number of forms (books, games, videos, puzzles, etc.) One that could live outside of the classroom, or be delivered with existing curriculum—not changing what was taught, but how teaching was implemented.

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

Many in our group learned of the contest results watching the webcast together using Gchat. It was an early morning for those on the West Coast (6:30am). The runner-up and honorable mention winners went first, which confused us somewhat—but at the 12:25 mark, Design Play was announced. There were virtual high-fives and excited screaming in front of computer monitors across three time zones. Text messages and emails went out to the rest of the group (and alumni at CCA) and all were soon checking the results on the Core 77 website.

The judging panel had many great insights regarding all of the finalists, and our team was honored to be recognized among them, and for the finished result of months of effort poured in. It was also perfect that we were judged by an international panel—our project collaboration was across three United States time zones, so it was fitting that a jury from Europe was part of the process.

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

Three of the group members have continued to work together toward developing specific tools that integrate Design Play—the latest being an interactive storybook that links cross-cultural problem-solving. The title of the series is Adventures in Design, and it takes shape as a tablet and printed storybook. Interwoven with an engaging story line and characters are a collection of fun Design Play activities that offer children a self-guided experience as they learn design thinking principles while designing solutions to challenges.

We envision global distribution for this educational product, so a “Buy-an-App, Give-a-Book” business model is being used that ensures those who are unable to afford or access the App will still have the book available. It is set up to be an efficient, scalable business that maintains a human core. Visit http://www.designplay.org for the latest about this project.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?

The floods that hit Pakistan in 2010 were the seed for this project—the desire was to design something for the people of Pakistan that would last beyond earthquakes and floods, dictators and politics. Designing a future that would last meant giving not a designed ‘thing’ but giving the ‘process’ of design. What better place to start than with kids?

Our research phase identified that children share a basic set of play activities. Attaching design thinking skill-building to each of these activate was the next logical step in developing the Design Play framework. Later, after user-testing with children in a classroom environment, we began to realize the potential impact the Design Play framework could make on a global level. An impact that could be felt equally in the Western world, and in flood-ravaged Pakistan.

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

(more…)

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: Teal Triggs, Instructor
Location: London, United Kingdom
Category: Design Education initiatives
Award: Notable

Seeing Voices: Inside BT Archives

A unique collaboration between BT Heritage staff and students from MA Design Writing Criticism, LCC, in the use of specialist archives as an integrated teaching method for design writing and curation. Students selected an object from the communications archive to research and interpret resulting in a publication and exhibition.

BT is the world’s oldest communication company, with a direct line of descent from the first electric telegraph to present day digital technologies. The challenge was to provide a fresh perspective on BT’s extensive collection ranging from products (e.g. telephones, merchandising products, buildings, phone boxes), to print (e.g. advertising and poster campaigns, in-house magazines) and photographs. The collaboration was intended to show that: 1) MA Design Writing Criticism students could bring the collection to the attention of a new kind of audience, 2) the seven students could develop their skills via written and visual interpretation of the material, thereby bringing new perspectives to the interpretation of the archive, and 3) by fostering a shared learning experience there was a knowledge exchange unique to those involved. The students and staff operated as a ‘team’, contributing their skills, knowledge and critical understanding to the group discourse. As a result, a continually evolving dynamism was ensured.

The collaboration was embedded within the class entitled ‘Design Histories of Practice’ – which required students to reconsider the context of critical spaces drawing upon historical precedents, whilst at the same time giving due consideration to the role of the curator as critic and critic as curator, addressing issues of interpretation and audience reception.

What was exciting about this project was two things: First, by going back into history we learned that narratives lie in every archive and in every object and, second, that this was a collaboration about learning and making visible an often-invisible research process.

What is the latest news on your project?
The latest news is that we will be running the project again with BT Heritage and with a new group of students who begin the MA Design Writing Criticism course in October. We hope to do something different with the final publication. So watch this space!

What is 1 quick anecdote about your project?
The eureka moment for the project was when one of the students located a small book on the reference shelf of the BT Archive collection – it was a book from the 1920s about the magic of communication. We knew at that point this collaborative project was certainly on the right track.

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

(more…)

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: aruliden, Bernhardt Design, The School at Columbia University
Location: New York, New York, USA
Category: Notable for Design Education Initiatives
Award: Notable

Tools At Schools

Tools at Schools was an initiative to teach eighth graders the value of design as a problem solving tool at The School at Columbia University. The students were immersed in the entire design process, from research to ideation to 3D modeling and ultimately launch.

The brief we created was to demonstrate to 14 year-olds that everything around us is designed, and allow them to understand the value of design by merging math, science and art to create valuable end products that solve for something.
Our main focus when approaching the curriculum for this class was to emphasize the PROCESS of design and the methodology of design thinking, rather than the end product. We were fully immersed with the students on a weekly basis over the course of six months to ensure that for every problem they identified they also fully though-out a design solution. The students were also engaged with us, and each other, out of the classroom via their social network to maintain a continuously collaborative dialogue throughout the experience.

To be successful, the class needed to be as applicable to the real world as possible. So we started with something familiar. We asked the students to look to their everyday classroom environment as a launching pad for their ideas, and to conceive the classroom of the future. Furthermore, we asked American manufacturing company, Bernhardt Design, to partner with us in this effort and actually create prototypes to make the process real.

As a result, the students were fully immersed in the entire product development process, from research and ideation to 3D modeling and final prototypes. In the end, they utilized their thought process and problem-solving skills to create valuable and functional classroom products while clearly articulating the problems they were solving.

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

aruliden: We received an email from Core77 to tune in, and were like “HOLY SH#%@%#T! We gotta tell the kids!” Then we watched the results live as an office.

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

We’re doing the whole process over again, but this time with the faculty. We will be injecting innovation into The School at Columbia University’s professional development program by asking them to rethink how they do EVERYTHING in the classroom. From snacks to homework to recess, we will re-imagine the school of today.

What is 1 quick anecdote about your project?

We often dismiss the importance of the locker in a school environment. We learned that instead “the locker is like your bedroom for the year.”

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

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