Hasta La Ideas

Last week saw launch of the “Live/Work” Design Contest: our friends at Dwell Media and Design Within Reach are challenging designers to come up with a “classic of tomorrow” for the workplace, specifically the home office setting. To hear DWR CEO John Edelman tell it:

Design Within Reach is focused on making modern design accessible, which includes supporting emerging designers and educating consumers about their work. For us, the Live/Work Contest represents an exciting opportunity to partner with Dwell to discover new talent and simultaneously provide our customers with a workspace solution that improves productivity and helps them tackle everyday challenges.

The Live/Work Design Contest is open for submissions for duration of the month, and Dwell Editor-in-Chief Amanda Dameron notes that “this is an amazing opportunity for an under-the-radar or established designer to see a project realized”—that’s right, the winner might just land a contract with DWR. To that end, the judging panel will select up to 10 finalists based on both overall design and production potential. The online voting period will run for the first three weeks of May, culminating with live voting at WantedDesign 2012, where the finalists will be on display. From there, five entries will advance to the final round at Dwell on Design, the West Coast’s largest design fair, where they’ll be on view at DWR, with an announcement of the winner on June 22.

The deadline for submissions is March 31st, so head over to the contest page on Dwell for more details!

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It’s Friday morning here in New York, but it’s already the weekend for some of our overseas readers, which means you’re done with WORK for the week! Of course, we know that many of you are in school or have independent projects that could be considered WORK in the broad sense, and your entries for the Core77 and Braun Design in the Wild photo challenge reflect as much. We saw a whole range of implements, from a favorite pencil to a trusty hand drill, as well as particularly handy digital-age tools. Meanwhile, freshly-made prototypes and decommissioned machinery alike had an overtly design-minded sensibility, yet the gallery as a whole is a fascinating portrait of how you work whether you’re a designer or not.

JURY WINNER
System vs Chaos
Nour Malaeb, United States
We all have a system for the way we work. “Organization” is a very relative term; what might make total sense to you will look like complete chaos to the casual observer. Ultimately, you design the way you design.

POPULAR WINNER
Just a Pencil…?
Arina Fjodorova, Latvia
When choosing the object for this challenge, I could think of numerous things which to describe and which are interesting for me, but I felt that that was not enough. After writing down many pages notes and ideas, I realised that all this time I was holding the greatest invention of anything made by man—a pencil. Could you imagine that pencils were used by world famous scientists, artists, musicians to complete their magnificent works and give inspiration to all of us? Cheap and erasable pencils were used by astronauts instead of expensive ink pressurised pens. With pencils only Roald Dahl wrote all his books. With a pencil one can draw a line up to 56 km and still write with it if it is not sharpened. Thomas Edison and Van Gogh used for their creations only specially made pencils. Annually, 1 million pencils are used on the New York Stock Exchange.

I am a designer and I have to draw a lot. I have new markers, gel ink pens and permanent fine liners to make my work clean and understandable. But nothing makes it look more creative and impressive than a simple pencil drawing does.

It is thrilling to acknowledge how such a small and insignificant thing has affected life of human kind and has shaped the way the world likes today.

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Our friends over at Co.Design are pleased to announce their first design challenge, a joint effort with Porsche, with a brief that “stands out and piques the creative interest of talented designers.” The challenge, in short, is to “Design an object smaller than a living room and bigger than a purse, which references three design elements taken from Porsche 911s of the past or present. (But not a car!)”

Submit your design by April 6th for a chance to win the grand prize: a one-year lease for a Porsche 911, or the cash equivalent of $20,000. After an initial pass to narrow the field to the Top 25, judges Jens Martin Skibsted (who’s written on everything from space travel to culinary exploration for us), Dror Benshetrit (of Quadror fame) and Co.Design’s own Cliff Kuang will select seven finalists. The lucky few who advance will have the opportunity to “revise their original rendering to refine their concept even further. Include more detail, more thought and more creativity” before the final public voting period, though the judges will have final say in the winner, announced on May 21.

Co.Design has a nice gallery of inspirational images of the new 911; for further resources so happens that we recently came across a short documentary series on the hand-made history of the Porsche 356 dating back to the 60’s. Again, the primary criteria is to incorporate three Porsche-inspired design elements; any era is fair game.

See the full details here.

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It’s your lucky day! The IDSA has extended its late entry period for this year’s IDEA Awards to give you an extra week and a half to wrapup your entry and get it out the door. Since 1980, the IDSA has been honoring design excellence through their international awards program. This year, the program includes categories that encompass products, ecodesign, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research and concepts.

Dont procrastinate and get your entry in today! Check out some of our favorite picks from 2011—bronze, silver and gold—or head over to the IDEA2012 website for more details to enter! Hurry, the entry period closes on February 24th!

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“The best interaction design doesn’t just make things easier to use, it opens up new spaces for play and collaboration to enhance our relationship with the world and each other,” explained jurist Robert Fabricant, VP of Creative at frog. Kicking off the announcements for this year’s inaugural IxDA Interaction Awards, San Francisco-based agency Stimulant won Best in Show AND the Best in Category, Expressing for Loop Loop, an innovative music sequencer app that encourages kids and adults to create improvised musical compositions using their Sifteo cubes to stitch and layer a set of samples and beats.

Stimulant LoopLoop for Sifteo from Stimulant on Vimeo.

The People’s Choice Award went to Interaction Cubes by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation/Museum of Life. The project is an interactive module created for the exhibit “Elementar: a química que faz o mundo” (Elementary: the chemistry that makes up our world) for the Museum of Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Museu da Vida – Interaction Cubes from Mariana Duprat on Vimeo.

From a pool of over 300 entries representing 33 countries, 26 projects were awarded honors in the categories of Best in Show, Best Concept, Best Student, People’s Choice, and Best in Category for Optimizing, Connecting, Disrupting, Expressing, Engaging and Empowering.

Best Concept went to Out of the Box by London-based Vitamins, and the award for Best Student was given to Ishac Bertran from Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design for his project Pas-à-Pas.

Out of the box from Vitamins on Vimeo.

Pas A Pas from Ishac Bertran on Vimeo.

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners and click the jump for full list of 2012 Interaction Awards Winners!

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