Hasta La Ideas

Future or Fiction is a new series of internal competitions happening within frog that utilizes their amazingly broad talent pool of 1600 people spread across 10 studios and 15 locations around the globe. A brief is sent to designers in multiple studios. Individual or groups of designers generate concepts and they are reviewed by a small team of frog’s design leadership which includes Paul Bradley (Executive Creative Director of Industrial Design), Howard Nuk and our own Michael DiTullo (both Creative Directors) and then put to an internal vote for their top picks.

Now this is where you come in: Core77 will be publishing the best concepts for you to help determine which ideas are more FUTURE than FICTION through a community-wide vote. The winning concept will be refined by frog’s engineering concept and put through a technical feasibility evaluation, CAD simulation and possibly a proof of concept mockup to create a more realizable final design.

For our inaugural Future or Fiction entry, frog has chosen a pretty ambitious challenge. The energy industry has been going through dramatic change, and frog has been doing a lot of work there including a case study we recently published for ECOtality, and the Energy ThinkIn they hosted this year for the SGCC. The first Future or Fiction series spins off frog’s work in the energy sector…specifically wind energy. We think windmills are beautiful, but many proposed sites are often blocked due to aesthetics. Designers had to find innovative ways and unexpected solutions by rethinking how wind power could be harnessed through leveraging existing infrastructure or incorporating it into new infrastructure. Take a look through the below six concepts which range from collapsible mini turbines to wind walls! Your vote on which is the most realistic, least fictional, will decide which of these initial ideas will be taken to the next level of development.

(more…)