Readymade News

An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 01 December 2009

 

The Bloodhound SSC (Super Sonic Car) aims to break the 1000mph land speed record, that is just over 1600 kilometers per hour! The primary objective of the Project is to inspire the next generation to pursue careers in science, engineering, technology and maths - by demonstrating how they can be harnessed to achieve the seemingly impossible. Hakskeen Pan, in the Northern Cape of South Africa, a flat, hard surface over 20km (12 miles) long and 5km (3 miles) wide has been selected for the site of the world's fastest race track. See more images of the project here.

Konstantin Grcic has curated a great industrial design exhibition entitled ‘Real Design’ at  the Serpentine Gallery in London. The 43 objects were all designed in the past ten years and range from toys to transporting water. If you can’t make it to the exhibition before the 7th of February, be sure to visit the very interesting website. Image via DesignBoom.

 

Jonathan Ive has been named ‘Inventor of the Decade’ by The Guardian. Ive is responsible for developing the design language of Apples products which has contributed to the overall success of Apple, he works closely with Steve Jobs, but few other company employees are allowed to see what he's doing behind the tinted windows of his studio, which just increases the hype we suppose. 

If you are a fan of Roger Martin, there is a good article in The Globe and Mail discussing  amongst other things, hamburgers and "heuristics"; a concept that narrows down the business mystery to a manageable size, offering a solution. The article is a review of Prof. Martin’s ‘The Design Of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage’.

 

An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 24 November 2009

Fabrication Africa creates beautiful objects with a social conscience and a technological heritage. Inspired by Readymade’s collaboration with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) Professor, Neil Gershenfeld. Gershenfeld explains in his book, FAB , that instead of sending megatons of products around the world from factory to consumer, we could be sending electronic data around the world in seconds and making the products we need in our basements using personal fabricators. See Gershenfelds 2007 TED talk here.

The NEST range is Fabrication Africa’s way of bringing this vision to life. Working with the FABlab in Soshanguve, South Africa, Fabrication Africa created the NEST as the start of a range of distinctive new products which embrace social conscience. Economically empowering people like William Maseng is one of the objectives of Fabrication Africa. Read the story here at Design Altruism.

Continuing with the FAB theme, this article from Ponoko; MUJI and LEGO have teamed up to develop 4 sets of paper and LEGO brick sets, MUGO perhaps? 

Design Thinking is being used to improve business, health care and social enterprise, but can it improve peoples personal lives? Warren Berger thinks so, and with the help of several designers and Bruce Mau in particular he wrote Glimmer exploring ten groundbreaking principles of design in action—addressing business, social, and personal challenges, and improving the way we think, work, and live. Berger says the book's title expresses that moment when a new solution to an old problem comes into view. "The designer's job is to solve problems every day and create alternative solutions," Berger says. "What can the rest of us learn from that?" Via Fast Company. If you are into manifestos, here is Glimmers and Bruce Maus’. Core77 has a good review of the book here.

For words of advice for designers, read  Michael Bierut’s 7 steps to success (the lazy designer's guide to success):

1. Keep it simple.
2. Don’t reinvent the wheel (part 1).
3. Don’t reinvent the wheel (part 2): Rotate the tires instead.
4. Do as you’re told.
5. Steal.
6. Once you come up with something, never let it go.
7. Make other people do the work.

From Azure Magazine. Excerpted from a lecture by Michael Bierut at Toronto's Designthinkers conference, November 3 2009. Image courtesy Pentagram    .

           
Good news for young designers from Dexinger, “Red Dot is giving away up to 50 free registrations for the "red dot award: product design 2010" to up-and-coming designers. Designers can submit industrially manufactured products that were brought to market after 1 January 2008 and went into series production prior to 1 July 2010. On 11 December 2009, participants will have a chance to apply for the free product registrations for a period of 24 hours.” Good luck!

   

An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 17 November 2009

 
Dev Patnaik interviews Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management in Fast Company discussing integrative thinking. The article is titled 'Reinventing the MBA, 4 Reasons to Mix Business with Design Thinking', the 4 reasons are; Strategy is an act of design, Balancing the analytical and the intuitive is key to great leadership, Roger's take on design thinking isn't rooted in design and Templates and not management theory, are the enemies of innovation. Bottom line: "We don't necessarily need more design-minded businesspeople or more business-minded design people. We just need more people ready to take on mysteries."

Held over two days from the 18th-19th November, the inaugural Design Thinking Symposium is a rare opportunity to catch respected speakers such as the likes of Bruce Nussbaum, John Rehm from IDEO and as well as others from Parsons The New School for Design and Standford school. Keynote talks will touch on how Design Thinking and Education will be a timely force for innovation across industries and how it can innovate change within organizations.

 

The Design Thinking Symposium is part of the 2009 Singapore Design Festival taking place from 20 to 30 November 2009. Highlights of the 2009 Festival include Icsid World Design Congress and the INDEX: 'Design to Improve Life' exhibition. The Arivi Stove from Readymade pictured above was one of the finalists of the 2009 INDEX: Award.

Nokia has an interesting conceptual video that explores smart ecosystems at the centre of peoples mobile life five years from now. The video was part of The Way We Live Next 3.0, a unique two-day event at Nokia’s global headquarters in Espoo, Finland. The event featured presentations and demonstrations showing how Nokia is connecting and building the communities of the future.

If you are in London do yourself a favor and go see 'Less and More - the Design Ethos of Dieter Rams' at the Design Museum from November 18th, 2009 to March 7th, 2010. Via DesignBoom.

In case you don't know Dieter Rams' Ten Principles of good design, here they are:

1. Good design is innovative.
2. Good design makes a product useful.
3. Good design is aesthetic.
4. Good design makes a product understandable.
5. Good design is unobtrusive.
6. Good design is honest.
7. Good design is long-lasting.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
9. Good design is environmentally friendly.
10. Good design is as little design as possible.

An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 10 November 2009

It looks like Michael Young is on a roll after moving from Iceland to Hong Kong. DesignBoom has an article on the i24r3 portable wireless waterproof digital speaker and Dezeen covers his Chair-4A, a dining chair made of recycled aluminum.

Design Sojourn has posted a great video of Michael Bierut of Pentagram and Design Observer, summarizing 5 design secrets:

1) Listen first, then design
2) Don’t avoid the obvious
3) The problem contains the solution
4) Indulge your obsessions
5) Love is the answer

Beirut also says he is more "like a 'doctor' waiting for 'patients' to come to him with design problems to solve".    

The T.27 is the brainchild of McLaren F1 designer Gordon Murray and Zytek Automotive Technology. The car has been designed in a way that minimizes the use of materials and keeps the embedded carbon of the vehicle as low as possible. The firm claims the innovative manufacturing system will use 20 per cent less space and 80 per cent less capital investment than a conventional factory A spokesman for Gordon Murray Design said the body panels, for example, would be made from material originating from PET bottles. Via BBC.

Yesterday Tasos gave a talk at the SABS Design Institute which marked the opening  an exhibition tour of the 40 years of South African design excellence, celebrating original designs (innovations) from South Africa. Tasos presented selected Readymade projects including strategic consulting for Optimal Energy, the company behind the Joule and the Arivi Non-Pressure paraffin stove. See the presentation here. 

 

Lastly Wired.co.uk examines IDEO's design thinking approach and how they use lessons learned from product design to solving bigger challenges. Bill Moggridge one of the co-founders of IDEO says "if you don't get out there and see what it's like, then you couldn't really design it right."

An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 03 November 2009

Tasos has written an article for the November issue of Management Today; South Africa’s leading management Journal describing Design Thinking. The title is Design for future business: thinking like a designer to solve problems and create new solutions. Here is an excerpt: "Organizations everywhere are recognizing the need to change radically in a rapidly changing world. Unfortunately many of these attempts fail because traditional management systems lack the tools to innovate in complex environments and much less so when faced with wicked problems. However, some businesses have solved this dilemma and are able to consistently innovate and grow over the long term, despite temporary setbacks during economic downcycles. These include Apple, Dell, GE, P&G, Infosys. Tata, Toyota, Amazon and ebay. What these organizations all have in common is that they have used design thinking to help guide their traditional business processes. This has allowed them to concentrate on the factors that improve competitiveness rather than doing the wrong things very well.

Design thinking can radically change organizations by embracing complexity and constraints, working collaboratively and iteratively and using expanded logic to achieve this. Inherent in this approach is the ability to see issues as part of a system, with all of its components, relationships and maintaining a view of the overall context. Design thinking also is adept at cultivating a deep understanding of customers and using this together with the factors above to create synthesis, or resolution rather than compromise. Design implies something creative but this is not some sort of art school freeform wackiness, this is creativity in its true meaning as the act of creation. In that sense, design can be thought of as the careful conception of a plan and the disciplined execution of that plan to create something new. 

In fact, design has a process as structured and rigorous as anything in business. It is a process aimed at solving problems by using our ability to create new solutions. This design process consists of several phases. Firstly, creating common understanding by analyzing data and research. Secondly, creation, where the data and insights drawn from research guide the creation of new options. Thirdly, filtering, using critical thinking to select the most promising options. Fourthly, validation, where fieldwork is done to test assumptions. Fifthly, synthesis, where options are drawn into a business model and assembled into the strategic plan. Sixthly, engineering, which develops the idea technically. And finally, implementation where the chosen solution is built in totality."

For more on design thinking and what it means for business read The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin, review here and if you happen to be in New York on the 11th of November catch Bruce Nussbaum talking to Roger Martin and Tim Brown of IDEO.