Hasta La Ideas

It’s Christmas in July time, design fans! The results of the 2009 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition are in, which means that you can get a headstart on holiday shopping for things that only yesterday you didn’t know existed (e.g., the Gold award-winning LiftPod, a “personal, portable aerial work platform designed as an alternative to ladders”). Today BusinessWeek, the Industrial Designers Society of America, Target, and Autodesk announced 150 IDEA winners (31 Gold, 47 Silver, and 72 Bronze) chosen from 1,631 entries. The jury—chaired by Andrew Hartman of Philips Designs—also named 349 finalists.

Among the big winners were IDEO and Samsung, each with eight awards, Apple (7), Dell Experience Design Group (6), GE Healthcare (5), and NewDeal Design (4). ASTRO Studios, frog design, and fuseproject each took home three. Topping our wish list are the Gold award-winning ICON A5 amphibious sport plane, which we’ll fly while wearing New Balance’s amphibious shoes (winner of a Bronze). Meanwhile, back at the office, we’ll organize our physical piles in Teneo Storage Furniture (designed by Birsel + Seck for Herman Miller and the lone Gold winner in the Office & Productivity category) and stow the virtual stuff in Iriver design group’s supersleek Domino USB memory stick (taking home a Silver), although the task of choosing from among the nine available colors is bound to spark a debate at UnBeige HQ. Finally, our hopeless Diet Coke addiction finds a sustainable and design-friendly accessory in the Coca-Cola Refresh Recycling Bin (winner of a Bronze), made entirely from post-consumer recycled PET soda and water bottles by fuseproject’s Yves Behar, Josh Morenstein, and Nick Cronan. We’ll drink to that.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Remember on Friday when we said that everyone would be pleased with the Stirling Prize shortlist? Scratch that. The Guardian‘s Jonathan Glancey has chimed in with his editorial on the award’s latest picks and he finds the whole thing a little dull, the reaction to the world’s financial downfall causing the Stirling to go way too safe and restrained (except for two of the six picks, which Glancey describes as seeming “to represent the very economic culture that has caused so much pain”). What’s more, Glancey doesn’t just feel blah about these awards, but he uses them as a springboard to question the value of all awards, wondering how you can pit such wildly different pieces of architecture against one another. This, we feel, is a bit of a reach for the critic, since any sort of awards (outside of sports) are a completely subjective things with miscellaneous things put up against one another (see: every single movie/television/music awards). That’s not to say we love awards and will defend them to the end, and we should say what huge Glancey fans we are, but it just felt a little odd to read that from him, seeing as architecture competitions are sort of routine in that industry, aren’t they?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Vaguely related to the last two posts, if you strip out most everything except for the sustainability and the San Francisco-area parts, we turn to the Rising Tides competition. It was a contest put together by a number of organizations, chief among them the local AIA chapter in the Bay Area, which asked for submissions of plans to help deal with sea level rise in the San Francisco area, with a prize of $25,000 going to the best entry. It was an interesting brief in and of itself, but as our pal Kristen Richards pointed out, the surprise announcement of the winners yesterday was more intriguing. Notice we said “winners” there, as in plural prizes, a decision no one expected:

The selection of six winners was an unexpected twist in announcing the competition results and illustrated just how many different promising solutions were offered. Juror Walter Hood said it best when he stated, “San Francisco Bay is not the place for a single idea. Taken as a whole, the six winning entries begin to tell a story about adaptation to sea level rise.”

So now each winner will take home $4,166, their share of $25,000 divided by six.

Following up on a story we told you about back in early January, the clothing company Benetton has either picked the worst time or the best time to unveil the shortlist of their Designing in Teheran architecture competition, which will result in two new towers being built in Iran’s central city. Three finalists were selected for each of the two buildings (so six in total) and each of the shortlisted design are certainly stunning (Bustler has a huge collection of them all on one page), but given the recent activity in Iran, no matter how much additional press they can syphon of for themselves because of that recent focus on the country, does Benetton really want to a) step into an extremely unstable area where foreigners from the west aren’t looked upon very highly at the moment (in at least half the country) or b) be seen as “the company who opened up a shop so Iranians could get right down to what they’re desperately wanting right now: expensive shirts”? The whole thing seems a little wonky in the logic department. But hey, we’re writing about the company for the second time this year, so good or bad, we guess the PR is working.

Artists John Baldessari and Yoko Ono will receive Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement tomorrow at the opening ceremony of the Venice Biennale. The awards are presented by the President and the Board of the Venice Biennale Foundation based upon the suggestion of Daniel Birnbaum, the director of the 53rd International Art Exhibition. The award winners will also be featured in events over the weekend: tomorrow afternoon, Baldessari will sit down for a chat with Birnbaum and Steven Henry Madoff at the Arsenale and Ono will perform there on Sunday, followed by a conversation with David Ross. Meanwhile, the other Golden Lion Awards—for Best National Participation and Best Artist of the “Making Worlds” exhibition—and the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist of the exhibition will be selected by an international jury comprised of Angela Vettese (jury chair), Jack Bankowsky, Homi K. Bhabha, Sarat Maharaj, and Julia Voss.