Hasta La Ideas

Sagmeister & Walsh’s “Now is Better” project, seen here installed at the Jewish Museum, will be included in the 51st D&AD Annual and is up for a Yellow Pencil. (Photo: David Heald)

• On Monday a 192-member jury of leading creatives and designers began the business of judging the 51st D&AD Awards. As you await today’s installment of nominations and “in-books” in categories such as branding, graphic design, and art direction, page through the first five decades of excellence in visual thinking with D&AD 50, new from Taschen.

• The Tribeca Film Festival organizers recently announced its first six-second film competition, challenging amateur and pro filmmakers alike to make cinemagic with the bold, new, yet Super 8ish medium of Vine. The festival’s director of programming has narrowed down the approximately 400 entries to this shortlist. A jury consisting of director Penny Marshall, Vine-loving actor Adam Goldberg, and the team from 5 Second Films will have the final say on the winners, which will be announced next Friday.

• Transform the leather jacket languishing in the back of your closet into something that doesn’t scream “Wilsons Leather circa 1998″ with Remade USA, designer Shannon South‘s freshly relaunched custom service that repurposes individual vintage leather jackets into new one-of-a-kind handbags, through redesign and reconstruction.

• And speaking of textile innovation, on May 1, New York’s Eyebeam presents “Smart Textiles: Fashion That Responds,” a panel that will bring together a diverse group of designers and scientists working in cutting-edge textile research and production–think nanoparticles, circuit boards, and clothing that’s more responsive to changing needs and conditions.

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From STEM to STEAM to…Psy? Worlds will collide on April 26, when NYU’s Stern School of Business plays host to a ceremony and luncheon for the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards. Presented annually by the Tribeca Film Festival in association with the Disruptor Foundation and Mr. Disruptive Innovation himself, Clay Christensen, the awards showcase applications of and advancements in disruptive innovation theory–how simpler, cheaper technologies, products, and services can decimate industry leaders–that have spread beyond the original technological and industrial sweetspots.

Joining past honorees such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the Guggenheim’s YouTube Play, and Kickstarter are 2013 disrupters including RISD President John Maeda‘s STEM to STEAM initiative, which adds art and design into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) quartet; fashion designer and wellness advocate Norma Kamali; K-Pop sensation Psy; and Twyla Tharp, who will receive the lifetime achievement award. Here’s hoping that those four hit and off and get to work on an even more disruptive collaborative project. The full list of honorees is below. Each will take home Disruptor Award statuettes known as “Maslow’s Silver Hammer,” in honor of psychologist Abe “Hierarchy of Needs” Maslow, who once said, “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail.”
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Superior mousetraps have their public health benefits, but they’ve got nothing on condoms. Reinventing the modest but life-saving device (some 15 billion are produced each year) is among the latest round of “Grand Challenges Explorations,” an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has previously thrown its substantial resources behind design-minded projects such as rethinking the toilet and, in parternship with IDEO, a human-centered approach to poverty-related challenges. Grand Challenges Explorations is ready to award $100,000 grants to anyone–students, scientists, entrepreneurs–with a transformative condom idea:

We are looking for a Next Generation Condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use. Additional concepts that might increase uptake include attributes that increase ease-of-use for male and female condoms, for example better packaging or designs that are easier to properly apply. In addition, attributes that address and overcome cultural barriers are also desired. Proposals must (i) have a testable hypothesis, (ii) include an associated plan for how the idea would be tested or validated, and (iii) yield interpretable and unambiguous data in Phase I, in order to be considered for Phase II funding.

The entry process is as streamlined and agile as the grant-making program itself: simply complete the two-page online application. Puzzled by prophylactics? Check out the other new Grand Challenges topics, which include increasing interoperability of social good data and labor-saving innovations for women smallholder farmers.

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Portrait by Yoshiaki Tsutsui. The photo at right is Iwan Baan’s “Tokyo #1″ (2006), part of a project to celebrate the opening of Ito’s Mikimoto Ginza 2 building. See more of Baan’s work in a solo exhibition on view through April 13 at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Los Angeles.

“Firmness, commodity, and delight.” These are the three words–cribbed from Vitruvius, who considered “firmitas, utilitas, venustas” to be the fundamental principles of architecture–that appear on the Louis Sullivan-inspired bronze medallion that is awarded to each laureate of the Pritzker architecture prize. This year the coveted hardware goes to Toyo Ito, who’ll receive it along with $100,000 at a ceremony in Boston on May 29. Ito is the sixth Japanese architect to receive the prize, which has previously been awarded to Kenzo Tange, Fumihiko Maki, Tadao Ando, and SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.

Ito was selected by a jury that included Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who lauded the 71-year-old for “improving the quality of both public and private spaces,” and 2002 Pritzker laureate Glenn Murcutt, who praised Ito’s dogged, shape-shifting pursuit of excellence. “His work has not remained static and has never been predictable,” noted the Aussie architect. And for Ito, that’s exactly the point. “I have been designing architecture bearing in mind that it would be possible to realize more comfortable spaces if we are freed from all the restrictions even for a little bit,” said Ito upon learning of his award. “However, when one building is completed, I become painfully aware of my own inadequacy, and it turns into energy to challenge the next project. Probably this process must keep repeating itself in the future. Therefore, I will never fix my architectural style and never be satisfied with my works.”

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Ring! ring! It’s the future calling. With NYC’s current payphone contracts set to expire in 2014, the city is scouting for ways to modernize payphone infrastructure across the five boroughs and put all of that public space to the best possible use. Hence Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s appearance (via video link) at a December meeting of the New York Tech Meetup, where he announced the “Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge,” a competition to rally urban designers, planners, technologists, and policy experts to create physical and virtual prototypes that imagine the future of NYC’s public pay telephones. Frog Design hopped to it, and while the list of semi-finalists who will present their concepts at next Tuesday’s Demo Day has yet to be announced, something tells us Frog will be among them. In a talk on Saturday at Parsons’ Aftertaste symposium, Frog creative director Jonas Damon offered a sneak peek at the firm’s vision for payphones of the future:

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