Hasta La Ideas

At this year’s San Francisco Design Week (13-20 June 2014), an inaugural event will honor 15 female designers across two categories—up and coming and professionals. Sponsored by the Women in Industrial Design division of …

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The IDSA International Conference is just under three weeks away, and if you have yet to make plans to be in Chicago from August 21–24, we strongly suggest you do so ASAP. As always, the lineup of speakers is pretty stacked, and while we’ve crossed paths with many of this year’s speakers over the years, the IDSA keeps it fresh with the likes of, say, Paralympian Blake Leeper. Similarly, we were interesed to see Dr. Vijay Kumar‘s name among the presenters. I’d been curious about his work ever since the first video on “A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors” hit the web over a year and a half ago—check it out:

The research, at UPenn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab (GRASP for short), has come a long way since then, but Dr. Kumar noted that there is still a long way to go. After spending a recent sabbatical at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, he will continue his research in robotics—specifically, swarm dynamics. His recent TED Talk illustrates the latest developments in his research on aerial robo-collaboration:

Dr. Kumar promises to deliver a “more technical” presentation at the Hyatt Regency Chicago on Thursday, August 22, where he’ll share the latest developments on “Tiny Flying Robots“:

There are a number of labs and schools across the globe that have been experimenting with autonomous quadrotors—small flying robots that communicate with each other. They have already accomplished a number of seemingly difficult tasks, like juggling balls or building a tower. Given the ability to hover and fly, sense objects and communicate, there are already a thousand creative tasks they could perform.

Conversely, Dr. Kumar has long rejected the common mischaracterization of UAVs as drones, and vice versa, echoing former Air Force Chief General Norton Schwartz’s comment that these unmanned aircraft are, in fact, piloted. “This is one distinction that’s quite sharp that I’d like to make: the drones that we hear about in the press are actually remotely-piloted vehicles; they’re not drones, they’re human-driven. So this is a misnomer, and the press really should not be using that [term to describe them].”

Once he had cleared the air (so to speak), Dr. Kumar proceeded to share his thoughts on the real-world applications of swarms of autonomous quadrotors.

Core77: This is a conference for industrial designers, but you are an engineer by training and trade. What lessons do you hope to impart on the design community?

Dr. Vijay Kumar: Design is a broad thing—I suspect that [Conference attendees] are primarily interested in designing physical things, and I think if there’s one thing that’s changed, design is no longer about the physical thing. Every physical thing has software embedded in it, [so now,] when you think about design, you want to consider co-designing the software piece and the hardware piece. Smartphones, for example, already incorporate a lot of that—thinking about the user interface—which is an important new direction.

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A paper airplane flying contest might have cut it at some engineering conference in the 1950s, but the upcoming 2013 IDSA conference will be holding something considerably more exciting. Come August 24th in Chicago, ten 3D-printed cars will be launched down a model of a ski jump, and the car’s resultant flight (and the spectacle-worthiness of its crash) will be judged for excellence.

Whose ten 3D-printed cars, you ask? Maybe yours. The Launch Day 2013 competition is open to all comers, provided you get your 3D-printed design in by August 12th. That initial batch will be judged for both aesthetics and for “using unique attributes of 3D printing,” winnowing the field down to ten. The final ten will then be printed, then launched on the final day of the conference, and whomever’s design is judged the winner will take home a brand-new 3D printer. (Runners-up will get $100 gift cards from competition sponsor Inventables.)

There’s no cost to enter, and each entrant can submit up to five designs. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Which means yep, there’s a catch: You’ve gotta be in it to win it. Specifically, inside the conference center in Chicago, as only registered attendees are eligible to win.

Click here to get details on the build envelope and printer selection for entries.

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Although the waterspout photos were a new one for us, we’ve become aware of natural disasters in a way that would have been impossible twenty years ago, now that everyone with a cell phone camera is a de facto AP photographer. But there are plenty of disasters we have yet to see the inside of, because in the worst situations, your cell phone may have no juice, and you may be more worried about contacting emergency services than Instagramming a tornado.

It’s for that scenario that Alan Cymberknoh of SpareOne XPAL Power designed their titular SpareOne emergency cell phone. Although we took note when it first launched, it recently won Gold in the 2013 IDEA Communication Tools category. A “game-changing preparedeness device,” the SpareOne will always have power, provided you keep one commonplace object handy: A single AA battery.

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Of all the branches of industrial design that one could pursue, the design of medical devices is arguably the most important to society—and the least sexy-sounding. Automotive design probably wins the Most Sexy title, at least in the eyes of your average starry-eyed design student, so it’s ironic that medical design gets short shrift, in that the price points of the finished products can easily keep pace with automobiles. A high-end endoscope, for example, doesn’t sound like much more than a glorified camera—but they can set a hospital back some 70 grand.

That means endoscopes are developed-nation-only devices, despite their universally lifesaving potential. But a company called Evotech, which is dedicated to “[designing] medical devices for the bottom of the pyramid,” wants to change that. In partnership with IDEO.org, they won Gold in the Social Impact Design category of the 2013 IDEA program for their low-cost endoscope. “Using frugal innovation techniques,” Evotech writes, “we developed a light, portable endoscopy prototype for a fraction of the price of existing solutions.”

Evotech and [IDEO.org] redesigned the Low-Cost Portable Endoscope with off-the-shelf parts as a $250-$2,500 device powered by a laptop, making the endoscope smaller, portable, energy efficient, durable, waterproof and with the ability to manufacture at scale.

The challenge was to improve the device’s industrial design and develop a business model that would sustain it—and get the device to doctors whose patients would benefit from its use. With regard to the device’s design, the endoscope needed to enable doctors to make more precise diagnoses and to perform surgeries through a small incision, reducing patients’ risk of infection and recovery time. The endoscope also had to have the ability to be sterilized.

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