Hasta La Ideas

Designboom, in partnership with Incheon Metropolitan City, brings us the Incheon International Design Award 2009: Green Design and Daily Life. The competition (with a total of $41,000 in prize money!) asks designers to submit concepts in three categories: Green Design for Humans, City and Green Design and Green Design and Communication. In other words, products, architecture, environments, and visual communication entries will all be accepted. The judges include: Jerszy Seymour and Karim Rashid among them, so show them your best!

More information here.

Deadline: August, 25, 2009

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Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat have posted the top 20 finalists of their Frog’s Dream (pictured above), where McMansions have all been abandoned and are repurposed as biofilter water treatment plants, taking advantage of existing transportation systems to surround the city with a rich suburban wetland. We’re not sure why the McMansions remain standing (aren’t there toxins in there?), but it does make for a provocative visual!

On the other side of the spectrum is the Urban Sprawl Repair Kit (pictured above), a set of drawings that proposes small changes to common suburban building types, combatting sprawl. We love that Galina Tahchieva, the designer, visualized her new-urbanist ideas in true suburban style: developer-inspired, mock-watercolor renderings.

More images of these and a few more of our favorites follow after the jump, including a parasitic highway turbine and parking lot farms.

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We’re excited to announce the Design Ignites Change 2009 Implementation Award, which will grant $15,000 to a design concept that has the ability to ignite change within their local community. The parameters are broad, but the concepts must address a pressing social need within a community, be implemented within that community and deliver positive, measurable results.

The award is available to creative professionals and universities engaged in youth mentoring programs around social issues or universities using design thinking to address social issues. The eligibility seems a bit tricky, so be sure to read up on the guidelines.

Deadline: December 31, 2009

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Architecture for Humanity has announced the finalists for their 2009 Open Architecture Challenge, which invited entrants to design schools for underserved areas around the globe.

Shown up top is Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios & AfH UK’s “Adaptable Hillside Classroom: A multi-functional classroom in rural Uganda,” a design that uses the angles of the local topography to create an amphitheater effect while reducing the need for earthmoving equipment in its construction. In addition:

[The community] wants an assembly, dining and gathering space that can be used for community events and rented out during holidays to provide income. To economise on space and resources, it is proposed that a block of 3 classrooms can open up and combine into a larger, multi-use space. The classrooms are angled round in plan and the outer walls open onto a covered external space that they all face in towards, creating a natural gathering space. Acoustic problems with opening walls between classrooms are also avoided. The site for the new building is towards the bottom of the school, near the road, which gives the school a presence on the main road and provides easy public access when necessary.

Check out the rest of the finalists here.

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Designboom and Nissan are co-organizing Think Outside the Parking Box, an international design competition that seeks to challenge and reinvent conventional ideas of urban parking.

Can’t Park? Reduced parking availability and rising parking costs? Browsing aisle after aisle, fighting over the same parking spot? Got a ticket? Little aesthetic attractiveness of urban parking lots? As much as people love to drive, all good things must come to an end: Parking.

designboom and Nissan Motor Company are looking for YOUR artwork that illustrate your perception within the theme ‘Think outside the parking box’. Challenge conventional urban parking! playful enhanced parking technology, robotic facilities, safety, dynamic services, green parking … creative solutions that address urban parking problems, statements of objections, creative-innovative-and-hilarious ideas in form of videos, art- design objects and illustrations can be submitted.

Nissan Motor Company, Ltd. is currently the third largest Japanese car manufacturer. Two years ago Nissan launched Qashqai, a new breed of vehicle for the urban world. It is the first model to be styled by Nissan Design Europe in London and pioneered the crossover category in Europe. Qashqai is now Nissan’s best selling model. You are asked to include the ‘Qashqai’ or part of it (rear-view mirrors, grills, wheels, wheel caps,…) in your artwork.

View the competition brief for complete guidelines and registration instructions. Deadline: September 27th.

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