Hasta La Ideas

Photos: Trek Bicycle Corporation (above) and UnBeige (below)

As followers of the UnBeige Twitter feed learned only minutes after it was announced last night, Trek’s Lime bike edged out 197 other nominees to win the 2009 People’s Design Award from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Established in 2006, the award is chosen by the public through online voting. The Lime bike joins past winners the Zon Hearing Aid, Toms Shoes, and the Katrina Cottage.

In the final and highly-anticipated segment of the tenth annual National Design Awards ceremony held yesterday evening at Cipriani in New York City, chef and Food Network star Tyler Florence presented the People’s Design Award to Hans Eckholm (pictured above), senior industrial designer for Trek Bicycles. Eckholm was quick to credit the research of design consultancy IDEO (whose co-founder Bill Moggridge picked up the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement) and components manufacurer Shimano as critical to the development of the Lime, a coasting bike designed for the casual rider interested in biking for recreation and convenience.

After the ceremony, we tracked down Trek’s Michael Leighton, who has the enviable title of “Industrial Design Iconeer,” to learn more about the development and design of the Lime bike, which was introduced in 2007 and sells for approximately $500. The project came about after Shimano hired IDEO to analyze its business with an eye to customers that it was not already reaching, namely the 65 percent of Americans who do not currently own or ride a bike. “IDEO came back with this electronic shifting componentry, so when the rider goes faster on the bike, the gears basically shift automatically,” explained Leighton. “The user doesn’t have to think about it at all.”

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While Oscar Niemeyer, at 102, might hold the title for oldest-living starchitect, he’s closely trailed by the great I.M. Pei, who at 92, is still working. And for all those years of work, he’s had a bang up week thus far with the announcement that he will be receiving the Royal Institute of British Architects‘ highest honor (as well as in the field itself), the Royal Gold Medal:

Given in recognition of a lifetime’s work, the Royal Gold Medal is approved personally by Her Majesty the Queen and is given to a person or group of people who have had a significant influence “either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture”.

Pei, who is perhaps best known for creating the National Gallery of Art, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Louvre Pyramid (long before the McDonald’s addition), was nominated by newer starchitect David Adjaye, “who described the architect as a ‘giant in the canon of greats’.” Pei will receive the award in person this upcoming February, on the 11th, at the RIBA’s headquarters in London.

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Say “yes” to skydiving! A still from The Yes Men Fix the World, a documentary premiering Saturday at Film Forum in New York City.

High-minded hoaxers Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, better know as The Yes Men, are the winners of a new $25,000 award from Creative Time. The nonprofit arts organization has selected The Yes Men as the inaugural winners of the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, which will be awarded annually “to an artist who has committed her or his life’s work to social change in powerful and productive ways.” For Bichlbaum and Bonanno, that work is “exposing, perhaps deviously, the nastiness of powerful evildoers,” whether by posing as top executives of corporations they loathe or blanketing Manhattan with fake New York Posts filled with facts on climate change (cover story: “We’re Screwed”) the day before the United Nations summit. The Yes Men will receive the award on the evening of October 23 during the Creative Time Summit at the New York Public Library (purchase tickets here). For a closer look at the duo Naomi Klein has described as “the Jonathan Swift of the Jackass generation,” don’t miss The Yes Men Fix the World, which hits theaters beginning Saturday.

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(From left: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Richard Long, Zaha Hadid, Alfred Brendel, and Tom Stoppard)

Today the Japan Art Association announced the winners of the twenty-first Praemium Imperiale, the international arts prize established “in memory of His Imperial Highness Prince Takamatsu to celebrate the human spirit as expressed through the genius of the world’s artists.” The 2009 laureates are Zaha Hadid (architecture), Hiroshi Sugimoto (painting, a category that apparently encompasses photography), Richard Long (sculpture), Tom Stoppard (theater/film), and Alfred Brendel (music). Each winner receives 15 million yen (approximately $165,000 at current exchange rates) and a ticket to Tokyo, where they’ll receive their medals in an October 22 ceremony headlined by Prince Hitachi of Japan, who Wikipedia describes as “currently fourth in line to the Chrysanthemum throne.” This year’s crop of Praemium Imperiale laureates joins a roster of 104 artists that includes everyone from Frank Gehry and Jasper Johns to Ingmar Bergman and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Artists are nominated for the prize through international committees in each of the five fields that make recommendations to the Japan Art Association’s board of trustees, which ultimately selects the winners.

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Last year, the Zon Hearing Aid won the People’s Design Award, launched by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2006 to complement its annual National Design Awards. Voting is now open for the 2009 award. Through the evening of October 20, you can browse and vote for your favorite nominated design (self-adjusting eyeglasses, the High Line, and Gary Hustwit‘s industrial design documentary Objectified have come out of the gate strong) or nominate a new design. The winner will be announced on October 22 at the National Design Awards Gala in New York City and will be streamed live on the Cooper-Hewitt’s website that night.

Stay tuned to UnBeige, as over the next few weeks, we’ll be checking in with the Cooper-Hewitt to see which designs have received the most votes so far and monitoring the user comments on nominated designs (hint: if you’re going to comment, try to resist simply adding an Oprah-style “Love that!”). And as you nominate and vote, keep in mind that previous winners of the People’s Design Award (such as TOMS shoes and the Katrina Cottage) were notable for their socially conscious approach, what former Cooper-Hewitt director Paul Warwick Thompson has described as a “design that not only looks great, but helps the lives of less fortunate people around the world.”

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