Hasta La Ideas

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pIn our newest 1 Hour Design Challenge, Core77 and Seattle-based design firm a href=”http://www.teague.com/”Teague/a ask you to a href=”http://boards.core77.com/viewtopic.php?f=35t=21539″design a provocative gestural interface/a, using an everday object as a starting point. Teague will donate $500 in the name of the first place winner to NPower Seattle and in the name of the second place winner to Project H Design. The first place winner will also be awarded an Arduino Kit, to make those interfaces real./p

pTHEME: br /
Gestural Interfaces /p

pDOORS OPEN:br /
May 5, 2010/p

pDOORS CLOSE:br /
May 31st, 2010br /
11:59 PM PST/p

pBRIEF: br /
Digital interfaces, while compelling and empowering, drive us towards a flatness that’s disorienting and boring. We’re losing the richness that makes the physical world so compelling. Worse yet, we’re replacing intuitive interactions with poor substitutes in our effort to make everything ‘fit’ on screen./p

pThis 1 Hour Design Challenge invites designers to come up with a meaningful counterpoint to the all-in-one interface of the screen. You are tasked with creating a simple but engaging interaction that does not rely on a screen for input or output. You are free to appropriate an everyday object or to create a unique piece of geometry, but your solution must invite the user to interact with information or their surroundings in a way that encourages discovery while delivering an element of performance./p

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pFor example, in the diagram above, flipping over a chair switches an ‘open’ sign off. What if you could turn off your reading light by simply closing a book? What if your pen became heavier as you wrote larger checks? The best solutions combine object, ritual and context. What will yours be?/p

pTo learn more about the inspiration behind this challenge visit a href=”http://www.teague.com”Teague./a/p

pHOW TO ENTER:br /
Participants must execute their design in only 1 hour, based on an honor system. Upload sketches, diagrams or hi-res photos and a brief text description of your design to the a href=”http://boards.core77.com/viewtopic.php?f=35t=21539″designated submission forum/a. To discuss the challenge and the entries, visit the a href=”http://boards.core77.com/viewtopic.php?f=35t=21538″1HDC discussion forum./a/p

pJURY:br /
Winners will be selected by Core77 along with Ben Collette, Adam Kumpf and Tad Toulis from Teague./p

pCRITERIA:br /
Judging will be based on degree of innovation, strength of concept and ambition of idea./p

pPRIZE:br /
The first place winner will be awarded an Arduino kit and Teague will donate $500 in their name to NPower Seattle. The second Place winner will receive a $500 donation in their name to Project H Design./p

pa href=”http://boards.core77.com/viewtopic.php?f=35t=21539″strongENTER NOW!/strong/a/p

div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2010/05/1hdc-teague-lost.jpg” width=”468″ height=”312″ alt=”1hdc-teague-lost.jpg”//diva href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/new_1_hour_design_challenge_launches_today_theme_gestural_interfaces__16511.asp”(more…)/a
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The focus on Brazil’s tourist meccas of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador makes Belo Horizonte—the country’s third largest city and where I stayed on my recent visit to art park Inhotim—all the more appealing. Full of hidden gems, the city’s a worthy stopover when traveling to Brazil, exemplifying another angle of the famous Brazilian hospitality.

The Sion neighborhood stands out as one of my favorite under-the-radar stops. Although located next to the boutique-heavy district of Savassi, its residential, hilly streets give it a quiet, almost pensive side. Architect Patricia Naves, owner of design-objects shop Grampo (whose passion for design is a combination of her Brazilian background and schooling in Europe) introduced me to it.

Featuring Brazil’s best industrial product designers from Estudio Manus and the Campana Brosthers to locals like Anna Cunha (stationery) and Lucia Lou (jewelry), Naves—whose own inventive line Oiti combines elements of design with architecture; Karim Rashid brought home the Toast It cork trivets (pictured) on a visit—makes it a point to also incorporate tees and other assorted items within a wide price range so that everyone can leave with something. To inquire about their collection, part of which can be viewed online, call Grampo at +55 (31) 3327-4674 or email (info [at] grampodesign [dot] com [dot] br).

A few doors down is the ateliê of Rogerio Fernandes, a blazingly prolific artist who specializes in lithography. His pure pop illustrations burst with color and have a consistently upbeat nature about them. He likes to explore themes of love, which explains why so many of his pieces show people locking lips. Fernandes’ prints and other merchandise sells from his site.

A charming upstairs chocolatier producing artisan-quality Belgian chocolates, Ernestina Degryse and her Belgian husband Bertrand run Degryse, opening the shop after living in Brussels, where Ernestina learned to make candies like locals.

What most impressed me was not only the quality and taste of the chocolates (most Brazilian-made chocolate tend to load on fillers and fat), but also the incredible variation of shapes. Horse and pharaoh heads, pianos and grapes filled with gooey caramel or mint are all molded from the pre-formed trays the Degryses brought back from Belgium.

In a Brazilian twist, Degryse stocks bonbons filled with cachaca and caipirinha, which I’ve never encountered in Brazil before. The store takes international orders via e-mail—chocolates [dot] degryse [at] bol [dot] com [dot] br—and phone—+55 (31) 3227-4202.

Belo Horizonte, in the mining state of Minas Gerais, is a few hours by plane and eight hours by bus from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Who’s following in the footsteps of past Wallpaper* cover designers such as Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, and Anish Kapoor? You. The magazine is offering readers the opportunity to design their own unique cover of the August issue, which will be devoted to the handmade. It’s as easy as registering here before May 17 to gain access (later this month) to the online cover-making application, a virtual buffet of images, graphics, and patterns contributed by the likes of James Joyce, Nigel Robinson, and Anthony Burrill. After you’ve scaled, rotated, colored, and tweaked to your heart’s delight on the front, turn your attention to the back cover, where media partner Rolex is offering nine ad options. Once you’ve finished your stint as guest art director, Wallpaper* will get to work realizing your vision. Subscribers will receive their customized issues in early July. No subscription? No problem. Register to learn how you can order a single bespoke issue. Meanwhile, we’re just as excited about what will be between the covers of the August Wallpaper*: recently commissioned design projects that were exhibited in the Brioni house at last month’s Milan Furniture Fair.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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pemTop: Hospital room with sani-station and touch-point hardware: grab bar, faucet, and light switch. Bottom: Sani-station in hospital lobby. /em/p

pemCopper Touch/em is a system of antimicrobial touch-point hardware and sani-stations (alcohol gel dispensers) designed to be deployed in hospitals to reduce infection. The system kills germs in areas people are most likely to touch while addressing some of the behavioral challenges of infection control: hand-washing and cleaning surfaces. The products also showcase the newly-proven antimicrobial properties of copper alloys; the sani-stations act as communication points to brand the material at the place where germs are top of mind. /p

pThe project began when the Copper Alloy Association (CDA) approached us at a href=”http://www.pensanyc.com”Pensa/a with the problem of encouraging hospitals, CDA’s target market, to adopt copper alloys. Studies proving that these materials kill microbes faster and more effectively than any other antimicrobial material on the market and an EPA registration permitting health claims about these properties were not enough, so the CDA asked that we identify and design compelling hospital products that would inspire designers and manufacturers to use copper alloys wherever there was a need to fight infection./p

div class=”article_quote”Consistency, patient compliance, and error avoidance are all crucial factors in effective delivery of a therapy. This is the space where we excel: applying an understanding of human behavior to create solutions that work within our imperfect world./div

pTo develop a solution, we first had to understand the challenges of infection control in hospitals and the experiences of a range of hospital stakeholders, including infection control officers, cleaning staff, administrators, doctors, nurses, patients, architects, and facility managers./p

pimg src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2010/05/CDA-figure-1.jpg” width=”468″ height=”323″ alt=”CDA-figure-1.jpg”//p

pemAntimicrobial effectiveness: copper vs. the competition. Copper alloys have also been proven to kill Staphylococcus aureus, Enterobacter aerogenes, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and E. coli, in under two hours. /em/p

pbr /
bDesign and medical science/bbr /
The number of Americans who die every day from hospital-aquired infections (HAIs) is equivalent to one jumbo jet plane crashing every day, according to Donald Wright, MD, MPH, of the US Dept. of Health and Human Services. Surely, there would be an uproar if our society allowed for such continuing aviation disasters, but HAIs just don’t have the same prominence in public awareness. Hospitals are under a lot of pressure to rectify the situationmdash;pressure that includes the cessation of Medicare payments in cases of HAIs and several state laws mandating transparency or reporting of HAIsmdash;but fixing the problem is a struggle. The problem of the quantity of infections is compounded by antibiotic resistant “super bugs,” created by the overuse of antibiotics./p

pimg src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2010/05/CDA-figure-2.jpg” width=”468″ height=”314″ alt=”CDA-figure-2.jpg”//p

pemIn a real hospital room, it’s quickly obvious that microbes on surfaces aren’t the only issue. How many people touched this table? How does it get cleaned?/em/p

p”The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored.” mdash;Peter Pronovost, pioneer of medical checklists/p

pThrough the work of Peter Pronovost, we came to understand that infection control is largely an issue of effective implementation. The medical establishment already knows how to prevent infection in an ideal world (hand-washing, for example), but they struggle to implement that knowledge effectively in the real world. Even beyond infection control, the issue of effective delivery is one of the major challenges in healthcare today. Consistency, patient compliance, and error avoidance are all crucial factors in effective delivery of a therapy. Fortunately for designers, this is the space where we excel: applying an understanding of human behavior to create solutions that work within our imperfect world. This is what we needed to achieve with copper: the CDA has already shown it kills microbes (effective therapy), but the key issue for us was effective implementation. /pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/infectious_ideas_using_antimicrobial_copper_alloys_in_hospitals_by_alice_ro__16508.asp”(more…)/a
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