Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum announces winners and finalists of the 11th Annual National Design Awards, which recognize excellence across a variety of disciplines.

The Product Design Award is given to an individual or firm for exceptional and exemplary work in the design of consumer goods, technology, or home and office furnishings.

This year, the award has been given to Smart Design.
Founded in 1980, Smart Design is a multidisciplinary design consultancy led by Davin Stowell and Tom Dair. Smart Design uses insight and innovation to develop consumer products that meet peoples’ needs, answer market demands, and solve critical manufacturing challenges. Projects are designed with a focus on connecting with the end user and have included OXO Good Grips kitchen tools, the SmartGauge instrument cluster for the Ford Fusion Hybrid, New York City taxi graphics, medical devices for UCB, and HP Photosmart compact photo printers.

OXO Good Grips Kitchen Tools
Starting a revolution, one potato peeler at a time.

New York Taxi Graphics
Checkered past, bold new vision.

Johnson & Johnson Reach Wondergrip
Designed for kids, not miniature grown-ups.

Johnson & Johnson Operating Gowns
Breathable protection in the OR.

UCB/OXO Cimzia® Prefilled Syringe
Cimzia® is an innovative biological medication that can greatly alleviate the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease and Rheumatoid Arthritis.

The 2010 National Design Award nominations were solicited from a committee of more than 2,500 designers, educators, journalists, cultural figures and corporate leaders from every state in the nation.

Exploring Materials invites you to get inspired by physical forms and substances. Materials are like words. The richer your design vocabulary, the more design solutions you can see and express. Foam, mesh, wood, plastic, and wire each have behaviors and properties that suggest different types of structure, surface, and connection. Each has its place, consequences, and cost.

Understanding materials is essential to design, and understanding materials through hands-on experiment is absolutely crucial.

Use this book to begin looking at design with new eyes. Ignore what you already know, and find out how substances such as cardboard, cloth, metal, and rope can yield surprising structures with unexpected functions.

The book opens with case studies of the design process. Lively examples show how designers can interact with physical materials to jump-start the course of thinking and inventing and how they can involve real people and real environments to take a fresh look at real problems.

At the core of the book is a visual glossary of materials, organized both to inspire and inform. Everyday uses of each material are juxtaposed with experimental projects that reveal how designers from around the world have exploited materials in surprising and creative ways. The book concludes with a section on making it real, moving beyond the prototype to create a product that can be manufactured and marketed.

Book for sale on Amazon: Exploring Materials: Creative design for everyday objects
by Ellen Lupton and Inna Alesina (Princeton Architectural Press)

	The Initiative for Architecture and Design on Film announces the world premiere screening of its latest documentary, Contemporary Days: Robin and Lucienne Day Design the UK.
Robin and Lucienne Day

The ninety-minute film premieres on May 15, 2010 at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC. A question and answer session with Director Murray Grigor and Cinematographer Hamid Shams will follow the screening.

Robin and Lucienne Day transformed British design after World War II with striking furniture and textiles that signaled a new era of modernist sensibilities for everyday living. Robin’s revolutionary furniture designs introduced materials such as plastic, steel and plywood to homes, offices and schools.

His stacking polypropylene chair endures as an icon and now graces a Royal Mail postage stamp.

Commemorative British stamp with Robin's chair, Manufactured by Hille, 1963

Lucienne’s abstract textile designs brought accessible elegance into the homes of postwar British consumers.

Helix Fabric - Lucienne Day - Manufactured by Thomas Somerset, 1970.
Printed Linen (Collection of Jill A. Wiltse and H. Kirk Brown III)

The Days’ fresh design approaches, including their contributions to the Royal Festival Hall in 1951, helped fuel the artistic and commercial awakening that led Britain out of the devastation of World War II.

Armchair for the Royal Festival Hall - Robin Day, 1951

The film traces the Days’ personal and professional progression over the course of their careers, spanning more than seventy years—from their days at the Royal College of the Arts in the 1930s, through their long heyday at the forefront of British design, to their recent rediscovery by new generations of design aficionados.
World Premiere Screening.

Hillestack chair - Robin Day - Manufactured by Hille, 1959

Herb Antony Fabric - Lucienne Day - Manufactured by Heals, 1956

World Premiere Screening: 'Contemporary Days: Robin and Lucienne Day Design the UK'.
Design Onscreen-The Initiative for Architecture and Design on Film.
Saturday, May 15th, 2010
Washington, DC
7:30pm film start time (run time: 90 mins)
Tickets must be purchased in advance via the Design Onscreen.

The May 15th premiere event has been scheduled to coincide with the opening of 'Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-century Britain', an exhibition featuring Robin and Lucienne Day’s work, among other influential British designers, at Washington DC’s Textile Museum. The exhibition at the Textile Museum is from May 15 through September 12, 2010.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents an exhibition (now in Chicago) with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.

The 99 actions featured include projects related to the production of food and possibilities of urban agriculture; the planning and creation of public spaces to strengthen community interactions; the recycling of abandoned buildings for new purposes; the use of the urban fabric as a terrain for play such as soccer, climbing, skateboarding, or parkour; the alternate use of roads for walking, or rail lines as park space; the design of clothing to circumvent urban barriers against resting on benches or sliding on railings; among others.

Here are some of the projects.

Ping-Pong Connects Neighbours (© Droog Design - Photo by Misha de Ridder) The Table Tennis Fence subverts the fence as a dividing element. A built-in ping pong table can be opened for neighbours to play with each other, transforming the fence into a meeting place. Share Fence is a related project with cut-outs in the shape of gardening tools like trowels and a watering can. Neighbours can hang tools to be shared in fence holes where they are accessible from both sides. Droog Design was founded in Amsterdam in 1993 by Bakker and Renny Ramakers. NEXT Architects was founded by four graduates from the Delft University of Technology.

Sheep and Lambs Eat City Parks (©Daniele Hosmer Zambelli)

The city of Turin saved 30,000 euros by using sheep to mow lawns at three public parks. In Pasture in the City, cows were also used during the experimental first year, but because they produced too much manure they have not returned. Traffic is diverted for the herd of sheep to enter the city. After the animals are rotated through fenced-off parks for two months, they return to the Alps for the remainder of the summer. The sheep aerate and fertilize their temporary pastures.

Reclaim Vacant Lot with What City’s Got (© Recetas Urbanas)

A proposal made to the city of Seville for legislation to assist in the temporary transformation of public and private solares – vacant lots walled off for security – into public spaces for at least six months. Wall rubble is incorporated into the design, and elements of car and pedestrian barriers are used to construct benches, see-saws, swings, and bike racks with readily available plastic materials like concrete. Instruction sheets were produced to allow residents to construct their own furniture. The project is designed to minimize material movement, cost, and other barriers to change. Santiago Cirugeda is an architect based in Seville who has proposed semi-legal strategies for housing and urban renovation under the name Recetas Urbanas, or “urban prescriptions,” since 1996. He inhabits gaps between laws, exploiting overlap and oversight to practice autonomous architecture.

Outlaw Gardeners Beautify City (© Richard Reynolds)

Richard Reynolds, or Richard 001, as he is known in the Guerillagardening.org organization, descends on traffic islands, forgotten parks, public gardens, and roadway edges with troops around the world; he transforms ignored spaces into beautiful gardens. Other troops focus on productive planting, encouraging vegetable and fruit farming in the city.
Although Richard 001’s little war against mundane landscaping began in 2004 when he became fed up with the sorry condition of the yard in front of his apartment building, the guerrilla gardening movement can be traced back to at least the 1970s, when artists like Liz Christy and Gordon Matta-Clark used the term to describe illegal, and often nocturnal, horticulture missions.

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On August 28 2009 Danish Minister of Culture Carina Christensen presented the Time to design – new talent award 2009 at the National Workshops for Arts and Crafts.

Corian PING PONG table, design by Hunn Wai - Photo credit: Daniel Peh

The jury selected two talented young designers: Hunn Wai and Francesca Lanzavecchia, as winners of the talent award from more than 35 different countries all over the world.

Corian 'PING PONG table' design by Hunn Wai - Photo credit: Daniel Peh

The two will meet in Scandinavia to take on the challenging task: their winning project "Spaziale Series: New expressions of skin and structure". The project that is based on voids, skin and structure. Taking inspiration from fashion, architecture and human behaviours, they will amalgamate those inputs, according to their vision, into a new breed of interior objects that will question our perception on the rituals of possessions storage and ecology-awareness within furniture manufacture, distribution and construction.

'Tre di Una chairs' design by Hunn Wai - Photo credit: Myoung Won Suh	'Skin Shelf' prototype /sketch

The designer-duo will work with flexibility and susceptibility in different types of materials. The key is the potential changes; the mean is the mystery emerged out of the imagination of what is hiding behind the wrapped items. By adding the concept to a series of products the duo will let new possibilities and perspectives grow in relation to the function of furniture, aesthetic, interaction and purpose.

Francesca Lanzavecchia, proaesthetics, disability artifacts, lingerie	'Wood x', plastic shelf, design by Hunn Wai

Wai & Lanzavecchia began the cooperation at the Design Academy Eindhoven, where both studied IM Master (Interior / Industrial / Identity Design) under the management of Gijs Bakker, co-founder of Droog Design.