Readymade News

SABS DISA Design Excellence Awards open for entry

South Africa's premier product design award has opened for entries for 2007.   

Online registrations will be available next week at www.designinstitute.org.za 

Do you want to give me links for next weeks' newsletter?

I'll be travelling tomorrow night and won't get to Singapore till noon Tuesday in Singapore. Its saturday night right now where I'm at. So, if you'll email me your urls I'll credit them to you. Eric, you need to send me your last name please to the gmail address where its funnyp ok?

niti

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Prototype: An Illustrated Weekly of World Design

Welcome to the inaugural issue of An Illustrated Weekly of World Design. We look forward to taking you on a journey through the world wide web of information that touches upon this world we live in, the artifacts we create and make, the fragile ecosystem upon which all our networks hinge and sustainable solutions to mankinds most pressing problems.

Email us if you would like to receive this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday morning, South African time.

niti

Jan Chipchase, researcher extraordinaire at Nokia, has just published a comprehensive summary titled "Ten things you didn't know about Mobile TV" and its supported by at least four more presentations and papers to download. What a juicy way to start an online weekend, methinks a must read.

New blogs I added to my subscriptions this week include Institute of Design grad Myron Smith's Design Planning & Theory blog,  John Hagel's Edge Perspectives, Richard Florida's The Creativity Exchange and Uri Baruchin's Marketing Babylon.  niblettes recommends Hagel and Florida highly, I believe he studied with Florida at CMU so I figured he knew what he was talking about. Worth a browse, all of them.

Some interesting things in the news this week include this indepth case study of the recyclability of single use disposable cameras.  Also Karen Field, Editor in Chief of Design News takes a cold hard look at Engineers and their Appliances from Hell, snippet here,

Rick Mainhart pointed out that we can thank the MBAs running the companies for all those lousy products. "The common theme in today's manufacturing environment is to 'take the cost out.' This means that instead of designing a part that will last a decade, that part is engineered to last just until the warranty expires and no longer."

Charles Bartel reminisced about the "good old days" when buying a brand name product actually meant something. "Now I watch the refrigerators in the neighborhood on trash day. The average life seems to be about five years. What happened to the 15 years or more my parents got out of their appliances?"

Lots of awards popping up on the radar screen - Two students from Samsung Art & Design Institute have just won a Red Dot award to be presented in Singapore tomorrow. Singapore just had their inaugural design awards ceremony yesterday. Next year's Red Dot award deadlines have been announced as have the deadlines for the IDEA awards. In case you missed it, here's also a link to Africa's first and only Red Dot award winner.

Sony and Ericsson expand their ties to move forward in mobile TV applications and technology. They foresee mobile TV becoming a mainstream phenomenon and want to be prepared. Back when it was just Ericsson Mobile phones, I pulled together a live radio show as improvised by The Second City at CES 1999. Fun days... now why can't they give their phones away through a podcast with improv artists instead?

Want more? Subscribe now and get the regular full length newsletter every Thursday except for the upcoming holidays but we'll be regular from January 2007, how's that for a deal? Oh and its FREE.

Best,
niti

Congratulations Clive!

The Design Management Institute announced their 2006 DMI Design Management Team of the Year Award. It has been granted to Philips Design and Teague .

Congratulations, Clive!