Hasta La Ideas

Electrolux Design Lab, the annual design competition that asks design students to envision the future of product design, is coming into the home stretch for this year. Some 1700 entrants from around the world have been winnowed down into just eight finalists, through three rounds of judging, with the winner to be announced on October 16th.

This year’s EDL was a little different in that the categories were opened up a bit, expanding beyond appliances into accessories, consumables or services. Still, two out of our three finalist faves still fall into the appliance category.

First up is the ballet-dancer-inspired 3F (for “Form Follows Function”), a shape-shifting vacuum cleaner by Germain Verbrackel, an ID student at France’s Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique:

Writes Verbrackel:

It is designed to economise space in compact and urban apartments; thanks to its autonomous mobility and capacity for physical metamorphosis, -3F- is a living product, responsive to its consumer’s needs.

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Text & images courtesy of Zach Kaplan / Inventables

This year at the IDSA International Conference, Inventables teamed up with Computer Aided Technologies, Stratasys, Models Plus and the 3D Printer Experience to hold a pinewood 3D-printed derby contest, Launch Day. Back in July, we made an open call to any designer in the world to create a car that used pinewood derby wheels, a ball bearing, and would be launched off of a ski jump style track. Entries would be judged on three criteria: best flight (farthest distance), best crash, and best looks. Each of these three winners would win an Up Mini 3D printer from Inventables.

Over 100 designers from all over the world submitted cars. It was difficult to narrow it down, but Paul Hatch, founder of TEAMS Design and conference chair, and I narrowed it down to the ten cars we thought would be most likely to win in each of these three categories. The cars were then printed by Stratasys, Computer Aided Technologies, Kalidescope and The 3D Printer Experience. Finally, Models Plus built the track that the cars would race down to their destruction.

With the ten cars printed and on display before the 1,000 designers who attended the conference, the excitement for the race was building. For those of you who missed it or attendees who want to relive the experience, we had six cameras capturing the action, including a slow motion camera to grab the crashes. Check it out:

See more on the event on the Inventables blog.

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Insofar as the so-called Internet of Things is increasingly regarded as, well, a real thing, the tech and design communities alike have found common ground in pioneering and speculating as to just what those Things might be and how they might work. We’ve seen a fair share of them—from concept to prototype to final product—but it remains to be seen as to whether, say, Google Glass will see the widespread adoption.

Nevertheless, the connected devices represent the future of technology, and digital agency R/GA recently announced a partnership with startup accelerator Techstars to lead the way: “The R/GA Connected Devices Accelerator is a three-month, immersive, mentor-driven program for ten tech startups. Show us how you combine hardware, data, digital services, and innovative design—anything that adds to the ever-growing Internet of Things—and your company could go from startup to success story.”

For three months starting in early December, R/GA will host the startups at their NYC offices, where the teams will have access to dozens of mentors, as well as up to $120K in funding. The deadline to apply for the Connected Devices accelerator is October 11, and the program will culminate with the presentation of the projects at SXSWi 2014. More details are available at RGAAccelerator.com.

Hat-tip to Tech Crunch

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In what we’d say is a particularly big coincidence, news of two noteworthy technological feats, both named “Atlas,” hit the web yesterday: aerospace startup Aerovelo won the Sikorsky Prize with an aptly-named quadcopter, and DARPA officially unveiled a humanoid robot of the same name… within 500 miles of each other, in Toronto and Waltham, MA, respectively. Seeing as each breakthrough is worth a detailed investigation of its own, we’ll refer you to Popular Mechanics and the New York Times for the full scoop on each story, but here’s a quick rundown on just what humans have achieved this week.

On Thursday, July 12, the Aerovelo team, led by engineers and co-founders Cameron Robertson and Todd Reichert, claimed the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter [HPH] Competition, 33 years after it was established in 1980, one hundred years after Sikorsky successfully designed, built and piloted the world’s first four-engine fixed-wing aircraft (he passed away in 1972; his namesake prize is administered by American Helicopter Society International). Piloted by Reichert, the Atlas met or surpassed the three criteria for the prize: the craft must hover at least three meters above the ground in a horizontal area no larger than ten square meters for at least 60 seconds. Per PopMech:

[The prize-winning flight,] which lasted 64 seconds and reached a maximum altitude of 3.3 meters… came at the very end of five days of test flights [at an indoor soccer stadium near Toronto], after which the space would no longer be available. On two earlier flights, Reichert pilot [sic] the craft, called Atlas, to heights of 2 meters and 2.5 meters. With just minutes remaining before the team was scheduled to vacate the stadium to make way for an evening soccer practice, Reichert managed to squeeze in one last flight. Within 10 seconds a horn sounded signaling that he had exceeded the 3-meter mark.

Their accomplishment is all the more remarkable because it took them only 20 months to bring the Atlas quadcopter from concept to history-making reality. After six months of initial planning, Robertson, Reichert & Co. turned to Kickstarter to raise $30 large towards their projected $170,000 budget (no word on the final bill for the project; the estimated delivery for the prize, per the June 2012 campaign, was last September, so I imagine they sought another round of funding at some point). The quadcopter comes in with a rotor radius of just over 10m and weighs in at 55 kilos (just over 120lbs)—far less than Reichert himself, a longtime athlete who weighs in at 80kg; full tech specs here.

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For everyone returning, welcome back to Project Medusa. You’re (still) invited to this party! Every AIGA member who wanted to participate was invited to this party, in fact, which ensured a great cross-section of designers. Intrigued? (If none of this makes any sense to you, click here.) Ziba produced this research effort to look into AIGA’s future, and learn directly from its members—working in Reno, Providence and everywhere in between—what the future of the organization should look like. This meant, implicitly, that younger members’ voices were key, and that drove decisions about many of the elements we’re going to look at in Part 2. The key to designing your own research project is know your audience… you can’t expect much success hunting for a totally unfamiliar animal.

We’ll start with some overarching considerations, and then get into the nitty-gritty, with a checklist for conducting rich, relevant research.

1.) Preparation is key.
If you take only one thing away from this series, it should be the importance of being prepared. Without proper planning, you can only try and catch up after the fact: too little, too late. This flows directly out of advice from Part 1 of the Project Medusa How-To series. We can’t emphasize enough that you need to do your research before you start the research. What do you want to know? It’s difficult find anything of meaning unless you know (at the very least) where to start looking, even with highly sophisticated design research methods. With your goals identified, think back to your audience: if you don’t ask the right people, it won’t matter how good the question is. Rubbish in means rubbish out, no matter how you slice it. (More on this in Part 3, still to come.)

2.) Everything is intentional… and should be directed.
Project Medusa took the form of an interactive film with coordinating activities, to guide individual AIGA chapters to host their own informational workshops and sketch a new vision for the entire organization. This allowed Ziba to control the overall look and feel, in keeping with a designed research outreach, while still allowing us to leverage the personal knowledge and connections that each local moderator brought to the table.

Even if your research effort will be a simple web survey, consider how your presentation might affect your results. Be intentional with whatever tools you’ve got: slips of paper, a series of roundtable discussions, or formal focus groups. Consider your biases—what you think you know starting out, and any other assumptions surrounding the inquiry—and do what you can to make these supposed liabilities into assets, too.

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