Hasta La Ideas

When you think about the convenience of paper towels, you easily overlook the material consumption and waste that makes absorbing life’s daily spills such an under appreciated guilty pleasure. The figures are staggering: people produce 3,000 tons of paper towel waste each day, on top of the needed 17 trees and 20,000 gallons of water used to create each ton of super absorbent landfill. What to do?

It’s time to break the paper towel chains of oppression and make the switch to reusable towels! PeopleTowels, makers of sustainable, reusable, organic cotton towels, have teamed up with Inhabitat to organize a design competition where your skills can help make the difference.

We’re looking for clever, compelling green-themed graphic designs that can be printed onto a reusable cloth PeopleTowel to open people’s eyes to the situation and encourage the world to cut paper towel waste. The grand prize winner of this competition will receive $500 and 10% of royalties on every towel sold…

There’s just a few days left to enter, so enter today!

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A couple of fascinating Photoshop contests over at the excellent Worth1000 website:

The “Carnocchio” series had entrants take popular automobiles and modify them into cartoon-like caricatures that look, we’d imagine, like what an auto designer might sketch up during that initial “inspiration” phase, where you’re trying to capture the spirit of a particular vehicle.

Entries in the “Invisible World” series take iconic photographs of Madonna, Shaft, Yao Ming and others and remove the humans from the acts, lending an eerie impartiality to celebrity moments without the celebrities.

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Calling all Students! Interested in communication solutions? Want to apply design-thinking to better utilize technologies? Ever hoped to have Yves Behar (fuseproject), Lisa Strausfeld (Pentagram), Richard Seymour (Seymourpowell) or our own Allan Chochinov (Core77) look at your work?

The “Autism Connects” technology and design competition challenges students to help individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to better connect with the world around them, and allow individuals who do not have ASD to better understand and connect with those who do. Even NFL Hall-of-Famer Dan Marino is getting into the cause! Help create real-world solutions for individuals with ASD and win $5000 in this international student competition! In addition, Autism Speaks will award creators (or one representative in the case of a team entry) of the top three designs a $1,000 stipend and registration fees to attend the 2011 International Meeting for Autism Research, to be held May 12 to 14, 2011 in San Diego, CA, where they will be invited to present their design concept. Get full contest info here or check out the brief after the jump.

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Core77 was proud to work with Aava Mobile to create two distinct design invitational challenges. In the first phase, we combed through the 200,000+ portfolios on our site Coroflot.com to find the 5 most creative thinkers and sketchers in the world of consumer products. Each created sets of scenarios articulating the potential use-case scenarios of the mobile device. The second phase challenged one of the phase 1 participants as well as an additional designer to create more refined, rendered concepts closer to production pieces rather than blue-sky concepts. Both of the designers took the challenge seriously (and with delight) delivering incredible work that was both rigorous and imaginative. Core77 could not have been happier with the results, and we are gratified to continue making strong connections between designers and manufacturers.

As a celebration of the success of phase 2, we are publishing the case studies from each of the designers to share some of their learnings from this design invitational. Thomas Valcke, a Belgium-based product designer shares his process below.

PHASE 1
In concepting design options for the Lampi, the design challenge was to explore new form-languages for future Aava smartphone models and docking-stations. The hardware components and layout were setout beforehand so the challenge was a styling exercise: exploring forms and shapes to convey a certain kind of character and emotion. I began by exploring many form-languages (angular, organic, basic). After my initial exploration, it was clear that the challenge lie in styling an object that is nothing but a box without making the styling itself superfluous.

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If you missed last Friday’s deadline to enter the IDSA 2011 IDEA Awards, you’ll be happy to know that the program’s organizers have announced a deadline extension for procrastinator’s and potential winners alike. Late entrants now have until February 13th to submit their entry in this prestigious industry annual, showcasing the best designs from 2010.

To top it all off, IDSA is making it even easier for student entries by waiving the late fee which we all know equals a lot of ramen noodles and extra prismacolor pencils.

Let this be one New Year resolution you actually keep! Stop wasting time and visit IDSA’s website for more detail, and you can remember to thank Core77 when you pick up your award in September.

Core77 is a proud media sponsor of IDSA’s IDEA 2011 Awards.

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