ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) calls for design solutions in the face of the disaster in Haiti.
In a global appeal following the devastation in Haiti, Icsid has launched a call to designers from all disciplines to unite in an open dialogue with international relief organisations to assess potential design-effective rehabilitation projects. In support of the UN’s efforts to help the Haitian people overcome challenges in relation to the country’s reconstruction plans, designers, academics and design students, as well as experienced developmental workers are encouraged to join the discussion and become a fan of the 'Uniting Designers in Disaster' page on Facebook.
Designers have a strong desire to support the relief effort. This forum is intended to help identify tangible opportunities and empower the design community to contribute to the cause.
"As an international non-governmental organisation with over 50 years experience implementing projects of global appeal, Icsid is poised with the strategic understanding of the processes required by NGOs to develop and implement result-driven and effective initiatives," stated Icsid President Dr. Mark Breitenberg and Provost of California College of the Arts. "What we aim to do with the forum is engage designers to exchange information about initiatives and opportunities where they may contribute their design and problem solving skills. In addition, we are hoping that the dialogue between the design community, development workers and representatives from international agencies will subsequently facilitate relief efforts, such as those currently being prepared by the UN to help the people of Haiti meet long-term stabilisation and reconstruction objectives."
Among its key mission statements, Icsid strives to provide an international platform for the design community to be heard as a powerful voice. Although active participation and contributions will continue on the Facebook page, in an effort to take immediate action, all information posted via the forum will be actively reviewed in order to select opportunities for immediate international activities.
"This is a call to think in order to act," stated Breitenberg. "Our immediate goal is to gain a better understanding of the relief efforts needed in order to facilitate the development of design-led solutions that impact Haiti's quality of life."
For more information, please contact: Andrea Springer t: +1 514 448 4949 ext. 232 e: aspringer@icsid.org
The Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) has announced the winners of its collaborative industrial design competition with 3M Canada. Third-year Industrial Design students were asked to create new Scotch tape and Post-it Note Pop-up dispensers. The competition was incorporated into the curriculum of OCAD’s Industrial Design program, and all students in this field were required to create at least one of the two products. To do so, they worked with representatives from 3M Canada throughout the course of the past semester, mimicking the marketplace's back-and-forth dialogue between designers and their clients. These advisors came to check in on the students every two weeks or so, offering their advice and helping students focus their ideas. They also provided the designers with a brief that covered subjects such as cost requirements and the products' target markets, and they told the students that their designs had to integrate an environmental component into the manufacture, life, and user cycles.
Once the designs were complete, approximately fifteen of them were selected to move on to the final round of judging. After some serious deliberation and some narrowing down of the finalists, Matthew Pacione and Scott Currie were declared the winners of the Scotch tape and Post-it Note contests, respectively. For winning, they each received a $3,000 cash prize (second-place prizes of $1,000 were also given to Catalina Navarro and Arash Sadr). Pacione and Currie’s final products may not seem that detailed at first glance, but each took many hours of deliberation and numerous variations of their models.
Scotch Tape dispenser by Matthew Pacione (photo: Lino Ragno) To build his Scotch tape design, Pacione used a starch-based biological plastic and finished it with a biodegradable paint, but he says that his product can easily be made out of aluminum or cork. Despite the stringent requirements that the design brief laid out, the work looks vastly different from many of the other designs. According to Pacione, this occurred because even though 3M Canada “gave us a very narrow, focused demographic…within that, there’s still a range of users, so there was some freedom in that sense.”
Post-it Note Pop-up dispenser by Scott Currie (photo: Lino Ragno) Unlike Pacione’s model, Currie’s Post-it Note dispenser offers a much more basic aesthetic—but it certainly took as much work to create. “It seems simple,” he said, “but it took a lot of prototypes.” His model is built with an aluminum top and a cork base, and it took him quite some time to find a cover weight that wasn’t so heavy that it prevented notes from getting out but also wasn’t so light that it came off every time a Post-it was taken from the holder. When explaining his product, he notes that his simple design was a conscious decision that was chosen because it allows 3M Canada to use whatever material they want for the base. “I was trying to keep it simple and at the same time let 3M decide what they want to do with aesthetics,” he said.
On top of their cash prizes, both Pacione and Currie’s designs will be manufactured by 3M Canada—quite the reward for a class project. Although the launch of these isn’t expected until 2010, those who were able to check out OCAD's Graduate Exhibition this past weekend were able to get a sneak peek of them in person, as well as some of the other final-round designs.
What qualifies as a crisis? Royal College of Art Design Products students’ Sold Out Shop will offer the stimulus to rethink what a crisis actually is...
During the Milan Salone 2009, a team of young design students from Platform 10, one of six teaching units within the College’s department, will be taking up residence at the prestigious Seves glassblock showroom in the heart of the city.
The fourteen postgraduate student designers will stage a makeshift Crisis Shop, exhibiting a range of crisis products. The shop layout will embody the very nature of a potential crisis - a canopy, attached by suction pads, hooks and grommets will stretch across the glass surfaces of the showroom. Under extreme tension, the canopy serves to communicate a sense of urgency, a material under stress and physical tension.
The Shop isn’t about making a commodity out of a crisis but investing in the means to respond to crises at large. One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity. All products in the Crisis Shop are examples of opportunities in disguise.
The collective response to this state of alert can be broken down into two clearly defined product categories: those that require an ‘Immediate Response’ and those that opt for ‘Mutations’. The group have deliberately emphasised the ‘closeness’ in crisis and consequently closeness to the body. Subsequent incarnations frequently deal with this through solutions of wear-ability.
Exhibition from April 22 to 27 2009 Showroom Seves glassblock - Via Lodovico il Moro 25/27 - 20143, Milan, Italy
ASM/Mtrl presents a two-day workshop on Materials for Designers:
Materiality: How Metals and Polymers Influence Our Senses and Inspire Our Designs.
This series of highly immersive workshops will provide you the knowledge and insight necessary to visualize the ways in which the latest materials and fabrication processes can influence design. Materials selection behavior for aesthetics, consumer acceptance, durability, cost, fabrication, compatibility and workability will all be explored.
Core knowledge for industrial design. At the intersection of art, science, engineering and industry, materials have the capacity to transcend function, becoming touchstones of widely shared human experience that live forever. Broaden your design vocabulary with greater command of the metals and polymers that ultimately bring designs to life.
Key ingredients to a successful design include choosing the right materials and processing them to produce products your customers’ desire. This seminar will provide you with knowledge and tools to combine the art and science of materials selection for your designs. Be a source of knowledge for your clients, engineering staff and production houses by understanding and designing sharply with metals & polymers.
The instructor Dr. Kuhn is currently director of R&D for The Ex One Company, with responsibility for developing and implementing rapid manufacturing and rapid tooling technologies. A Fellow of ASM International, the world’s leading society for materials science and engineering, Dr. Kuhn understands how materials and processes influence design. At Drexel University and the University of Pittsburgh, he developed courses in powder metallurgy, engineering design, failure analysis and mechanical metallurgy – four specialties of great interest to design professionals.
Seattle WA: Sept. 18-19 - Experience Music Project at Seattle Center Boston MA: Oct. 16-17 - Institute for Human Centered Design at Adaptive Environments Los Angeles CA: Nov. 13-14 - W Hotel Miami Beach FL: Dec. 15-16 - Doubletree Ocean Point Resort
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