Beam Summer Camp in Strafford, NH is an 8-week program for aspiring builders, architects, designers, and DIY-ers aged 7-17. Each year the camp “commissions unique large-scale collaborative” designs for projects that are built by the campers over the course of the summer. Previous years’ projects have included rolling machines, floating contraptions, aerial installations, and tree houses. Beam Camp is actively seeking proposals for next summer’s project, with a deadline of December 31st. Let your imaginations run wild!
Six concept cars channel Hollywood for design inspiration
As part of the eighth annual Design Los Angeles automobile designer’s conference, this year’s Design Challenge tasked six studios from Germany, Japan and the U.S. to design “Hollywood’s Hottest New Movie Car.” Each team—Honda, Hyundai, Subaru, Mercedes-Benz, Maybach and Smart—presented their idea through sketches, renderings, models and even mock movie trailers.
As a holistic design challenge—centered around but not exclusive to automotive concept—the competition judged each entry on how the vehicle reflects the brand within the movie plot, how it relates to their target audience, the level of imagination and character development of the vehicle and overall ingenuity of the story, car and character combination.
Standouts include the post-apocalypse-inspired Honda‘s IH (Intelligent Horse) and Subaru Horizon for their story development, while Mercedes-Benz wowed everyone with a full-scale model of their Silver Lightning—hoop wheels and all—a formula 1 inspired concept drawing a direct connection from past to future achieved through safety and style. Going after the inner child in everyone, Maybach‘s Berline gives Cinderella’s coach a futuristic transformation.
As the winner of the Challenge, the Smart 341 Parkour is reminiscent of the rocket-shooting, martini-shaking cars of James Bond lore, albeit pared down to tackle more everyday problems like small parking spaces. The Smart design team created the concept for Annie, a fictional investigative journalist in need of a car as curious as she. Thus, the 341 Parkour is capable of driving, flying and even climbing—best illustrated by Smart’s promotional trailer created for the Challenge.
Following an event in Hanoi earlier this year, Tiger Beer brought its free art and music series, Tiger Translate, to Beijing. The most recent installment brought together artists from East and West to collaborate on the theme of the metropolis. This time around, however, Tiger Translate tweaked the creative process and came up with “Double Vision,” for which four artists were each given photographs of Beijing to overlay with their graphic designs live during the Tiger Translate showdown.
Michael Paul Young, Mojoko, Marcie Liu and Shadow Chen worked alone and in teams to apply their signature designs to shots of the city’s iconic skyscrapers, landmarks and everyday street scenes. The results were wildly diverse, with some works exuding a comic book feel and others taking inspiration by the free form and colors of street art.
While the artists did get to preview the photos, they had to design on the fly, cut-and-paste-style. Each round lasted 20-30 minutes and audience members could watch the whole process go down on big screens. In all, almost a half-dozen images were produced for the event.
Tiger Translate’s next events will be in Manila on 18 November and Sydney on 23 November 2011. To see more images, check out the slideshow below.
Infiniti Design is a “young, rapidly-growing brand” that has taken to championing dynamism and internationality, alongside creativity, innovation, technology and design culture. The second edition of the Infiniti Design De-Contest, “Living Everywhere”—open to designers born after January 1, 1972—looks towards film as a source of inspiration for furniture design.
Aimed at young designers of any nationality, it will award projects that best represent one of the five continents, taking inspiration from how they have been portrayed in some internationaly renowned movies.
Taking as a starting point the idea that the history of design should be seen as a process of evolution which draws inspiration from all the different parts and arts of the world, designers are asked to design innovative furnishings which represent their continent of origin, interpreting this continent according to how it is portrayed in the world of cinema… In other words, when creating their design, designers must use a film which is set entirely in the continent where they live as their inspiration.
Thus, the categories are simply three regions: Europe & Africa, Asia & Oceania and the Americas. Films include everything from Casablanca to Invictus, Doctor Zhivago to Slumdog Millionaire, New York, New York to The Big Lebowski—for each region, respectively—for a total of 24 films (eight per region).
Winners, as judged by an “expert panel of judges” will receive a contract from Infiniti to produce their entry, which can be a chair, stool, table or “other home furnishing accessory.” The deadline for submissions is February 29, 2012… which will allow just enough time for the winning products to be exhibited at the Salone del Mobile di Milano 2012.
Top: G-Chair by Jakob Thau; Bottom: Drop Chair by Radice-Orlandini Design; courtesy of Infiniti
Click here for more details, or skip ahead to the announcement (PDF), which has the full list of films.
Good news! We know you’re going to ask for it, so we’re extending our Fast Track to the Mobile App design challenge a full two days through this coming weekend (Extended deadline—Sunday, November 20th, 11:59pm EST). Now there’s no excuse not to put the finishing touches on your app design submissions. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines thinking you’d never get your entry done in time for this Friday, you’ve got an extra 48 hours to go for the gold, or in this case, an app development deal to help bring your masterpiece to marketplace. You’re welcome!
If you’re just tuning in, Fast Track to the Mobile App is a mobile app design competition giving designers with little-to-no coding experience an opportunity to get your best business and workplace app concepts into the Windows Phone Marketplace. You’ll retain the rights to your design and share revenues with a partner developer on your app sales. There’s a whole list of prizes including the chance to have your winning work presented at Mobile World Congress in 2012. So check out the competition site, register if you haven’t already, and submit your best entries by 11:59pm EST this Sunday, November 20th.
February 2012 will see the fifth annual IxDA conference, Interaction12, in Dublin, Ireland. Over the course of the first four days of the month, the Convention Center and IADT will host a series of keynotes, presentations and workshops for interaction designers from across the globe.
In conjunction with the conference, the IxDA is challenging the next generation of ace interaction designers to “design the future of the news“:
People follow breaking news via Twitter. Tablets, mobile phones, paywalls, RSS feeds, viral videos and other elements have found their way into the current news landscape. The experience has swollen far beyond the icons of the daily newspaper on your doorstep and the 6 o’clock newscast.
We know that people are consuming news differently, and these emerging practices are changing the news…
This year, Thomson Reuters and the IxDA challenge you to look beyond the forms of delivery to address the behaviors, interactions and goals that surround news.
The Interaction12 Student Design Challenge is intended to examine issues including but not limited to: what people are trying to achieve with the news; how we identify important or relevant stories; and emerging trends in news reportage, from hyperlocal to citizen journalism.
The first stage consists of a video ‘audition,’ in which “the judges will be looking for interaction design ability and how you communicate your thinking on the theme, rather than examining any design work you’ve done to create solutions around the theme.” Finalists will receive travel and accommodation to Dublin, as well as student registration in Interaction12 and enrollment in an on-site masterclass that consists of additional opportunities (read: prizes).
Submit your video by December 5 for a chance to win; see more details and the full registration form here.
It amazing to me that you can take several dozen opinionated design experts from around the world, throw them in an airplane-hangar-sized space filled with design objects for two days, and get them to reach a consensus on which are the most awards-worthy. But that’s exactly what happened a few weeks ago, when the iF International Forum Design convened 44 jurors to examine over 4,000 entries and select the winners of the 2012 iF Design Awards.
This year they actually shot the proceedings and posted them on YouTube to launch iF Close-up, the organization’s new monthly video podcast. We don’t get to see any jurors heatedly issuing broken-beer-bottle challenges or rolling around on the floor, but the five-minute video does give you an idea of what goes on at the proceedings. As Awards Chairman Professor Fritz Frenkler notes, one of the biggest challenges in wading through such an enormous selection is getting everyone to stay fresh, so that the objects perused in the evenings are getting the same fair shake as the ones viewed in the mornings.
Hit the jump for a complete list of people you see (and hear) in the video.
It’s time to fire-up your favorite image editor, grab a cup of coffee and crank out that awesome app idea you’ve been dreaming about for the Fast Track to the Mobile App design challenge. There’s less than two weeks remaining to enter with a shot at winning one of five revenue-sharing development deals to help bring your app idea to Windows Marketplace, along with other great prizes.
In recent weeks we’ve been seeing lots of great app entries coming in that tackle all sorts of daily business tasks like trend analyzing, intuitive tools for note taking and every other area of work life that could benefit from some sort of push-button ease-of-use. The real beauty of this design challenge is there’s no coding or programming experience required. Right now, more than ever, designers from all practices with little or no IX design experience can participate in this exciting and expansive area of product design that is increasingly effecting the world’s population in a positive way. We’ve even got some great Photoshop templates that take some of the work out of prototyping your apps screen designs.
If you haven’t signed up, there’s still time to register and submit your great idea. Login to enter and submit your entry by midnight on Friday, November 18th!
This year’s Los Angeles Auto Show Design Challenge is one of the more fun design competitions we’ve seen in a while. Tasked with designing “Hollywood’s Hottest New Movie Car,” major auto studios are vying for the prize by not only designing a car, but by coming up with a theoretically feature-worthy story to go along with it.
Honda has gone futuristic-meets-Western with their IH (Intelligent Horse) concept, intended to inhabit a moviescape called High Noon—no relation to the original—that follows themes of the post-apocalyptic variety:
Honda takes us hundreds of years into the future to a world disrupted by the impact of a gigantic comet. The resulting heat and drought have wiped out technology, infrastructure and life as we know it, making it imperative for the few remaining survivors to recover faster than any human generation before. The few scientists have created a vehicle that serves as a companion and protector in the inhospitable and lonely environment. Their inspiration—the legend and material remains of an ancient creature called the horse.
The tulip glass is a textbook example of a design object that has crossover appeal for particularly astute (some might say snobby) subset of imbibers, the contingent of beer-quaffing gastronomes that has grown alongside the microbrewing trend.
A tulip glass not only helps trap the aroma, but also aids in maintaining large heads, creating a visual and olfactory sensation. The body is bulbous, but the top flares out to form a lip which helps head retention. It is recommended for serving Scottish ales, American double/imperial IPAs, barleywines, Belgian ales and other aromatic beers. Some pint glasses which taper outwards towards the top are also called tulip glasses, despite having notably less curvature.
The WIkipedia article quoted above tellingly includes a photo of Duvel, arguably the definitive Belgian strong ale, as an example of a style befitting the iconic glass, emblazoned with their unmistakable red logo. If the Internet is any indication, the Duvel tulip glass, in particular, has something of a cult following (across at least three http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/3983649″ target=”_blank”>separate threads on Beer Advocate forums).
The brand is clearly aware of this enthusiasm, as they launched a series of artist collaborations for their classic glassware back in 2007, featuring limited-edition designs from the likes of Arne Quinze, Denis Meyers, Parra, Eley Kishimoto, Daan Stuyven and Stefan Glerum.
Glasses by Stefan Glerum (L) and Arne Quinze (R)
Now, Duvel is opening the field to designers in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom with an open call for the next tulip glass design in the Duvel Collection.
The grand prize, of course, will be full-scale production of the winning entry alongside the canon of current and future artists. Three second place winners will also win a trip to the finals in Paris, along with 50 glasses each, while ten third place finishers will receive a set of six of their designs.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Top: G-Chair by Jakob Thau; Bottom: Drop Chair by Radice-Orlandini Design; courtesy of Infiniti
Glasses by Stefan Glerum (L) and Arne Quinze (R)
Drafts by Parra