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

Designer: Sally Ng
Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Category: Design for Social Impact
Award: Student Notable

Thrive Portion Ware

Thrive Portion Ware consists of a cup and set of plates designed to help reduce food intake by 20% and help people develop the habit of consciously eating less. Plate tips if food is placed on raised area. Words on back are seen when users approach dish rack.

I know obesity is a huge multifaceted issue that isn’t going to have one nice neat solution. There isn’t going to be one. I ran into many circles and much frustration focusing too much on a specific age group and its needs. I focused on children, teens, young adults, adults; cycling through each one repeatedly. At the end of it, the best approach was the simplest one, to remake a familiar object people can easily use. I did not want it to be a fad consumer object promising easy miracles, only to be abandoned a few months later once the novelty wore off. I want it to be a product used repeatedly and easily where it will eventually have a positive psychological effect on people’s eating habits. Thrive Portion Ware works as a catalyst for that bigger change by helping people accustom to consuming less first.

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

I am finishing up the patenting process and working on a website for the project.

What is 1 quick anecdote about your project?

I had to stand back and honestly ask myself if I would ever use it throughout the whole research and design process. 124981491251 hours and an x amount of critics later, the answer was yes.

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: Emma Watson
Location: Wellington, New Zealand
Category: Graphics/Branding/Identity
Award: Student Notable

HI – the Hazard Initiative

New Zealand is prone to natural disasters, especially earthquakes. In times of civil crisis a neighbourly support network can make all the difference. The Hazard Initiative is a subsidiary of Civil Defence, providing ways to initiate the pooling of community resources and encouraging students to get to know their neighbors.

Through my original supporting research I found that out that inner-city Wellington had the least sense of community and the lowest belief in the importance of a community in society. The area is also densely populated due to a large urban population living in and around CBD, high-rise buildings and subdivided houses and properties. As a result there is a lack of transitional space (such as driveways and front lawns) where traditionally neighbourhood interaction took place and pride was displayed. A united community is also incredibly beneficial as people feel safer, crime, litter and graffiti is reduced and people are more respectful and proud of their neighbourhood. This issue of ‘lack of community feeling’ was particularly important to me as I had been living in Wellington City for four years as I attended University, and had personally experienced this ‘neighbourly isolation.’

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

I have approached Civil Defense in Wellington about whether they could integrate my project into their current strategy. At the moment they are reviewing my work.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?

I left a package (addressed to me) outside my neighbour’s front door. It was an experiment to see if they would return it to me, and how long it would take them. That night my neighbour knocked on my door and returned it to me. I tried to use it as an excuse to introduce myself but he wasn’t that keen to stick around to chat!

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: Helen Furber
Location: London, United Kingdom
Category: Soft Goods/Apparel
Award: Student Winner

Euphemia

Proposing a cradle-to-cradle approach to fashion footwear creation, construction processes, materials and product life-cycle have been examined and re-designed. Icica wedge relies on the principles of modular construction and mechanical grip to replace glue. The result is a striking shoe with components which can be separated (for recycling/biodegrading) post-consumption.

The modular Icica construction allows different materials to be combined in a shoe and then separated for recycling/biodegrading. Materials testing and implementation of an end-life programme is the next step, establishing a programme for re-collecting and recycling materials, or adopting materials which can be recycled in the mainstream. Testing is required for each new material adopted, aiming for maximum reuse and potentially working with a recycling firm. The use of bio-based plastics as opposed to petroleum-based is another step, though more in-depth analysis of materials needs completing before the product is brought to market. Strict sourcing is imperative, producing as ethically and ecologically as possible. Manufacture is European and ethical, producing for the luxury market and utilizing skilled craftsmen. The use of organic leather is key to more ethical production of leather. Likewise replacing exotics with fish/ostrich means hides are a meat industry by-product and supplied by Atlantic leathers, the tannery is run on hydroelectricity and naturally heated geothermal water. Organic cotton organza is used in one upper. Trims are off-cuts. Materials in packaging are recycled unbleached card and embossed where branded, with shoe-bags made from organic brushed cotton.

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

My current main focus is a full-time design role but I’m hoping to find a sponsor to evolve the project in the future into a market-ready product.

What are some of the challenges you encountered developing your project?

I learned a lot throughout the project and made many mistakes. One that springs to mind is not to use modelling clay to adjust the last (form used to mould the upper of the shoe), as after several hours of careful moulding the toe dropped off! I also had a bit of a nightmare when it came to the photography, having organised the shoot with the fantastic David Abrahams (in my then living room!), 2 days before deadline and my 3rd model cancelled on me an hour before the start. I ended up running around topshop oxford circus asking people what size feet they have, and luckily my model just happened to be in the queue to pay…

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: Rune Kirt and Mads Thomsen
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Category: Speculative Objects/Concepts
Award: Professional Winner

KNARR Cargo Airship

KNARR is a wind turbine freight system by modern airship technology powered with solar energy. An alternative to existing heavy cargo freight systems – focusing on wind turbine. Transporting wind turbine parts up to 1000 tons from manufacture facilities to installation site with zero carbon emissions.

This project has sufficient impact to spark a societal debate. The current environmental challenges we are facing call for ground breaking , provocative yet realistic solutions. In our view, saving energy isn’t about recession, but about optimization and, ultimately, intelligence. By combining wind energy—a beacon of renewable power—and a technology rooted in decades of innovation—airships—we aim at providing one of the constellation of proposals that will make the world a more energy efficient place.

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

Rune: I was on holiday in France and at that time I was at the house of my parents in law in the countryside of Champagne. There was internet connection but I only had my iPad which couldn’t show the live web announcement. So I decided to wait to later and just watched some French television until then. Suddenly my phone was ringing and I could see it was from my parent back in Denmark. Then I knew something might have gone the right way. But my mum had only watched the video without sound because the computer loudspeakers didn’t work. She said: “They are showing your project in the end so I think you must be the winners!” Then I went to the website again and at this time the winning project was shown. It was the KNARR Cargo Airship. I got butterflies in my stomach and replied: ” Yeees, mum, you are right—we have won!!!” At the same time I got a tackling from the side. It was my wife who give me a big hug and said: “I am picking up the champagne!”

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

We have just established our own company—KirtThomsen—after having worked at the world’s largest wind turbine manufacture for 2.5 years. Beside the nicknames the ‘Air Captains’ or in Danish ‘Luftkaptajnerne’ our experience from the wind industry have given us a thorough knowledge of what it take to handle oversized components such as wind turbines. And more importantly, what is the business case for using modern airship technology to handle wind turbines.

So the project is actually very realistic and it is still something we are very much working on. But that is confidential.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?

When starting the project everybody around us were very skeptical and thought it was science-fiction. Our mentor and lector, Hugo Dines Schmidt, almost stopped us but after a good talk with him he was convinced that we had the energy and enthusiasm to make the project. Along the process he advised us to think about the process of transport handling and go out and talk with/watch/photo the real industry. After being at the docks of Arhus and at wind turbine producers we went all the way by train to South Germany from Denmark to visit the original Zeppelin company who’s daughter firm Zeppelin NT started developing airships again in the late 1990s. Exhausted after 17-hour train ride, we meet with our contact—a very dedicated German engineer, Johannes Eissing—who showed us their very large airship hangar with an airship under construction and we were lucky to see them take out a full operating airship to fly tourists to the Swiss Alps and back again. Afterwards we showed him our ideas and he gave us some useful feedback from constructional and aerodynamical perspective. He recommended we visit the local Zeppelin museum which we did. At the museum were build full-scale sections of Hindenburg and other amazing things from the golden era of airships. It was a perfect tour to gave us a feeling of scale, construction, materials and experience of these whales of the sky. No book, websites or phone calls could have given the same inspiration and eye-opener.

When presenting the final result Hugo told us that he recalled the doubt which he had in the beginning of the project as to whether it was a good idea or not.

Now, everywhere we go the project attracts a lot of attention. It has even led us to exhibit in Japan (Design center in Tokyo and temple in Kyoto), German radio interview by Deutche Welle, article in Brazilian magazine and a presentation at TEDx Oresund among other things.

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: Elaine Froehlich
Location: Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Category: Strategy/Research
Award: Student Runner-Up

Motion for Interface

I’m studying motion in order to understand and use it as a component in the design of digital interfaces. New computing environments need new strategies for interaction, including motion. My research explores motion into a taxonomy that describes motion within a screen, resulting in a language for motion in interface.

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

This research shows the tip on an iceberg of possibility. I deeply believe that interfaces need to move, and that the motion should be part of the information system. Ted Nelson, technological visionary who coined the term “hypertext,” had a similar idea. He said that making software is like making movies from both conceptual and sensory perspectives.

Many times in the course of pursuing this topic I was confronted with the idea that there is a limit to the amount of motion that can go on a screen but I contend that it’s a matter of how that motion is articulated that will determine its appropriateness. Rather than literal animations illustrating this or that process, motions can indicate levels and types of changes taking place, especially when looking at flowing data.

The challenge is to understand the symbolic messages in different kinds of motions and use them to make a point. In collecting my ideas and creating the taxonomy, I encountered a couple of topics that are as opaque to me now as the whole idea of motion was in the beginning: moving texture and pattern. In these areas enormous potential waits to be uncovered.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?

From the very beginning, thinking about the problem of harnessing motion into a visible language overwhelmed me. It seemed enormous and complex beyond possibility. Motion exists in time, the uni-directional, temporal coordinate of space-time we humans find impossible to perceive. I was both intensely interested and completely out of my depth. Most of the areas I investigated were new to me. I was learning new technologies at the same time that I was trying to work out how we understand through motion in life. Finding ways to build relevant projects that would yield insight was pretty haphazard much of the time. I created simplistic investigations trying to isolate bits of motion into discrete elements. Imagine the scenario where I stood up in front of my entire program and pronounced, “Look, it’s moving left.” Multiple times.

On nice days I used to take my beach chair to India Point Park in Providence, RI to work. It’s a little strip of grass that sits between route 195 East and the northernmost point of Narragansett Bay. One sunny day I sat on my blue and white canvas chair under a tree with the bay lapping in front of me and read this quote by Atistotle: “Motus est actus entis in potentia secundum quad in potentia est; (motion is the actuality of that which is potentiality, viewed from the standpoint of potential being).” The beauty, simplicity, and poetry took my breath away. Truthfully, it made me cry.

After many semesters of thinking about motion—researching, reading and trying to understand it by making studies based on little more than hunches—the impact of the quote was staggering. I had stumbled upon it as I was preparing to write the text for the thesis document. At that point I was in darkness. I had no idea how to link my seemingly haphazard projects together to make any conclusions about motion in my thesis. Aristotle’s quote was the first piece to click. One after another the pieces fell into place during the rest of the summer and into the fall. All of the strange paths I had wandered down showed their relevance. Like a lens getting steadily more and more focused, my journey took me from deep confusion to ever more clear ideas on how to organize definable aspects of motion into a taxonomy.

Aristotle quote from “Science and the Deallegorization of Motion” by Gerald Holton, page 24, The Nature And Art Of Motion, edited by Gyorgy Kepes, New York, G.Braziller, Inc., 1965.

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

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