Hasta La Ideas

Design giant Philips has been awarded a crapload of iF Design Awards (crapload = 22!), beyond the to-be-expected Audio/Video and Lifestyle product categories into the more surprising Health & Care, like their asthma-attack warning device, photo at bottom left.

The “design heritage” section of Philips’ website reminds us that these guys have been around for a while:

As far back as the 1920s, when Philips was just adopting mass production, we understood that to reach consumers everywhere, we first had to properly understand them. Under the leadership of Louis Kalff, Philips advertising, product design and even architecture were inspired by differences in local preferences and customs worldwide.

By the 1960s, Philips was a strong global brand, but there was still a lack of consistency in our product design. As a result, Rein Veersema created the Industrial Design Bureau, and design was elevated to the forefront of the Philips brand.

Read the rest of the story here, and look at the entire list of their award-winners here.

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Display manufacturers seem hellbent on making a TV that can cut an atom in half, and it looks like Sony’s winning this particular thinning contest. Their new Bravia ZX1 comes in at 9.9mm thick (and you just know getting that last 0.1mm off was a b*tch).

Interestingly enough, as part of the product launch Sony commissioned a survey asking 3,000 people what the most memorable thing they’d ever seen on a TV was. The top answer was unsurprising: Moon landing. Answer #3 was also to be expected, news of JFK’s assassination. But the #2 answer was a good deal more recent, the inauguration of Barack Obama. Nice to see that in a manufacturing downturn, one thing we’re still making is history.

via sky news

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If you’ve upgraded the hard drive in your laptop or desktop machine, then you’ve got a naked, homeless hard drive sitting around in one of your drawers. Put that puppy to use by plugging it into ThinkGeek’s External USB SATA Drive Dock and boom, you’ve got extra storage without the enclosure.

A professional photographer buddy of ours (who requires massive amounts of storage) uses the Drive Dock the way we used to use floppy drives: He’s got dozens of hard drives lying around, and he plugs them into the dock as needed.

At $39.99, buying a Drive Dock (and naked hard drives to go into it) is way cheaper than going the conventional enclosure-bound route, and it takes up less space on your desk.

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Artists have long been pioneers whose initially kooky-seeming notions later become mainstream; without them we’d probably not have loft living, for instance.

Now a handful of musicians are pioneering the adoption of touchscreen interfaces to execute something more complicated than ATM transactions: Light shows coordinated with music mixes. As digital piracy cuts into CD sales, live concerts have increased in importance for big-ticket musicians. And in an era of overstimulation, a stage and a mic just don’t cut it anymore.

Enter the JazzMutant Lemur, a Star-Trek-like device that looks as if it was designed at MIT’s Media Lab. The multitouch device controls sequencers, synthesizers, virtual instruments, and lights, giving musicians an absurd amount of control in the form of a little rectangle.

Children of the ’70s and ’80s may notice that this device looks almost exactly like an “instrument” a musician was playing in the pilot episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century:

And Daft Punk, in conjunction it the iTM Midi Lab, have even adapted the software to an iPod Touch:

Lastly, Fast Company has an article on the Lemur here.

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High school senior Trevor Leahy has used design to give him a slightly unsportsmanlike advantage: Combining skills he learned in a graphic design class with readings on Darwinism and camouflage, hockey goalie Leahy has developed a set of goalie pads that resemble the very net he’s guarding.

“When the shooter comes down and only has a split second to shoot the puck, they’re looking for net,” said Leahy, a senior from Hampton, N.H., who grew up in Byfield. “If you put the net on the pad, they’ll shoot at the pad instead of the goal.”

So far, Leahy has logged two shutouts with the pads. In practice, two of Pingree’s top scorers say, the illusion is particularly effective when there’s a scramble in front of the net and they need to shoot quickly… [Opposing players] say they have fired the puck directly into Leahy’s pads. The illusion diminishes if they are farther from the net, with more time to shoot.

Leahy, who had the pads custom-made by a Canadian manufacturer, has applied for a design patent.

via boston globe

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