Hasta La Ideas

Photos by Eder Robert

The Earlybird deadline for the 2014 Core77 Design Awards is only two days away! Save 20% on all entries submitted before 5pm EST on Thursday, January 30.

As the first deadline for this year’s program creeps up on us, we’ve been catching up with some 2013 honorees who took advantage of the Earlybird entry period about their award-winning projects. Yesterday, we spoke to one of the designers behind the Plinko Poetry Machine. This time, we touched base with ROLF Spectacles—a small, family-run business situated in the heart of the Tyrolean Alps in Austria—who submitted a series of glasses handmade from natural materials. Their project was named a Professional Runner Up in the Consumer Products category.

Read on to see how the team has grown professionally since last year’s Design Awards:

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Happy New Year, designers! We can’t wait to see what this year will bring for the Core77 Design Awards. The deadline to receive one of our limited edition silk-printed posters may have come and gone, but the earlybird deadline (with a 20% discounted registration fee) is still up for grabs if you submit your entry before January 30.

We’ve got a little motivation for you. We can give you a little insight into the fabulous jury captains who will be leading this year’s judging teams. Read on to get to know the people you’re out to impress:

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You might wonder how we come up with these super cool limited-edition posters each year. While we’d love to say we’re just that good, we can’t take all of the credit. As every designer/design enthusiast knows, there’s more than meets the eye—this time around, we decided to create a poster that portrays the lifestyle and work ethic of a designer. “Day in, Day out” is an ode to and celebration of the hard work and dedication that the design lifestyle demands. As always, we’re a program for the design true-believers and we wanted this year’s poster to illustrate that.

We also want to take some time to shine light on the people and processes that go into the finished product. This year, our featured designer is Brooklyn-based Manual Miranda—he’s also a design critic at Yale School of Art and a AIGA New York board member. Only 200 prints are available, so make sure you do what it takes to claim yours.

• 18×24 inches
• hand-screened at Toto Print Co. in Brooklyn
• silk-screened on French Construction Pure White 100lb. Cover paper
• free! (if you submit an entry early enough)

Now that you know everything about it, you must be dying to know how you can get your hands on one. Well, you’ll be pleased to learn that all you have to do is submit your entry before December 31st!

Get more information on the Core77 Design Awards and prepare your entry for submission here. What are you waiting for?!

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It’s the most marvelous time of the year—Core77 Design Awards! After three super successful years of receiving the best designs from professionals and students worldwide, we’re opening registration for our fourth go-around on December 10th. As always, we’re looking forward to seeing what fresh, new designs you have to share.

We know money is tight during the holidays, so we’re offering a 20% discount on the entry fee if you submit your project before the Earlybird deadline. And if you enter before December 31, 2013, we’ll also throw in one of our limited edition posters—designed by Manuel Miranda and screen-printed in Brooklyn—as a gift for being so fiscally responsible.

We also realize what a busy time it is right now so we’ll be reminding you about these important calendar dates after things have settled down, but for the record, here they are:

Dates to remember:

• Submissions Open: December 10, 2013
• Earlybird Deadline: January 30, 2014
• Official Deadline: March 20, 2014
• Winner Announcements: June 2014

Claim your Earlybird discount AND limited edition screen-printed poster by entering here before midnight Dec 31st.

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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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