June, 2010

The International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) is one of the most prestigious international design competitions in the world.  And the 2010 IDEA was so competitive that there were three Best in Shows awarded....

We've all seen them. At first, we used to see them only late at night and for anyone who hasn't slept well, you know what I mean. Now we see them through out the day and on almost every channel. I'm talking about direct response television ("DRTV"). One form of DRTV that is commonly known is called the infomercial. Ring a bell for you? One interesting company involved in the DRTV space is Lenfest Media Group.

DIY grooming saves money, but can also enhance your relationship with your pet.  Do it daily, gently (always working in the direction of the hair growth!),  reward your pet, and make grooming fun for your pet.  There will still be times you want to take your pet to the groomer for nail trimming and ear cleaning... and a good haircut.  But you can reduce those visits by half, if you can manage their fur 'issues.'

German designers have created the ultimate gadget for your dog: a GPS system for your dog in the form of a collar that sends you a map of your dog's location or an SMS message on your smart phone.  Of course, the collar has a SIM card; your dog needs a phone book!

ATREE? by the Bureau of Architecture, Research, and Design (BOARD), based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, was chosen as a finalist in the upcoming European Competition of Architecture, Design, Realisations in Eco and Agro-Materals (DREAM).  ATREE? will be one of 22 entries in the finals, and this first image suggests it will 'take a village' to grow it.

Information storage is big business, and paradoxically the smaller a thing you can store information on, the bigger your profile gets. Though the theoretical next smallest storage device was to be liquid crystals such as the ones found in computer monitors, experiments in that area have been one slowly-sinking failboat.

Until now.

Did you ever think you'd see a dog parachuting 10,000 feet from a military helicopter?  Dogs are the latest recruits in the Austrian special forces, and often when they 'step out' they are strapped to a human and a big parachute.

Students at New Jersey's Science & Technology University (NJIT), experimenting with parametric designs in their industrial design class, were invited to display their experiments at the London Festival of Architecture, June 19 to July 4, 2010. Their architectural objects illustrate new relationships between objects in 3-dimensions.

Kubrick collectors have been hoping to get their hands on mini figures featuring the heroes and villains of Disney-Pixar's smash hit, Toy Story 3. Now their patience is being rewarded as MediCom has announced the lineup for their Toy Story 3 Kubrick series.

You thought a 1.6 gallon tank was saving you water... although it's kind of weak with a flush. But the folks at Niagara Conservation Company have invented a new toilet flushing system that only uses .8 gallons of water on each flush, saving the average family about 20,000 gallons of water a year.  Meet the Stealth.

Fresh running water does have great appeal, even to pets.  Take cats, for example: it's the rare one who will even drink from a bowl of "stagnant" water.  And when you think about it, cats have it right... who wants to drink out of a bowl or a glass of water that's been sitting there for half a day or so?  Perhaps that's why the latest trend in pet drinking is not the 'pet bowl,' it's the 'pet fountain,' where water flows constantly, or on demand.

For a few days now, we've been hearing and reading about Gulf cleanup workers and people living close to the Gulf coming down with strange 'flu-like' symptoms.  The true diagnosis was difficult, because flu symptoms are common in the illness that's actually overcoming these workers - now patients.  It's called TILT, short for Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance.  What are the causes and symptoms?

The Best of NeoCon WTF 2010 furniture is displayed throughout the huge Merchanise Mart and yesterday, 81 awards were distributed ranging from architectural awards to workplace technologies.  Here are 11 of my favorite winners from the NeoCon WTF 2010 competition. (No, it's not the WTF you are thinking; it's the World Trade Fair!)

Last Christmas, the Zhu Zhu Pet Hamster was the blockbuster gift for kids. This year, I predict the box office hit for kids will be the video game Kinectimals, one of fifteen new Microsoft fully-interactive "sensoring" video games for its new Kinect Xbox 360.  Kinectimals are 20 wild virtual video pets, like tigers, lions and cheetahs, that kids can play with and even train. Parents will get a kick out of this game too!

...."Each year about 600,000 injured patients bleed to death worldwide," said Ian Roberts, co-author of the study published in the Lancet. "It's important to remember that deaths from injuries are increasing around the world and that they usually involve young adults, often the main breadwinner in the family. The impact on the family is devastating."

'Clever' has not left the Suck UK creators in this era of uncertainly and universal stress.  Its latest set of dead desk toys prove that.  They not only help relieve your stress, they make you smile, and they are functional as well.  All of the dead desk toys would made unique Father's Day gifts (better, for sure, than a tie!) for a Dad with a sense of humor.

Usually for me hot dogs have to be grilled outside on a hot day and have been cooked in a manner that creates a lot of extra crispy bits.  For anyone who feels similarly about hot dogs, the Spiral Hot Dog Cutter by Wynder may be for you.  This would make a great addition to Dad’s barbeque gadgets, perhaps even as a Father’s Day gift.     

There are several reported cases of persons who froze to death and lived to tell about it.  This phenomenon has disturbed the reasonable mind for centuries, but somehow some frozen dead persons, animals, and even fruit flies have come back to their normal, healthy lives after they went through extensive periods of no heart rate or respiration.

... Kimchi is a cooked vegetable dish made with cabbage and other vegetables like green onion, chive, cucumber, and radish, served at nearly every Korean meal, in some variety.  It is said that if a Korean goes without Kimchi for even a few days, his body will begin to crave it.  Alas, it's no surprise that it had to go into a Dunkin' Donut...

Inspired by man's innate desire to always want what is not his, Mexican industrial designer Christian Vivanco has taken a verbal metaphor for that desire - "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" - and turned it into a more literal metaphor - a green (grass) sofa with a surrounding picket fence.  Remember, though, there are two sides to that fence....

The Shabby Dog, seller of dog and people things that are anything but shabby, has come out with a line of products to get you and your dog off your respective bums.  After all, it's always easier to get in shape when you partner with a great companion.  And for a girl and her dog, Pupercise is chic and unique.

I have to admit feeling a sense of relief when garbage pick-up became automated.  It meant that I would be anonymous to the sanitation workers as well as to those searching the garbage dump for hidden treasures.  But here's industrial designer Craighton Berman, putting together a trash basket and a lamp, of all things, so that our trash can be... in fact, wants to be... observed... even searched by our family and guests.

Though Giant Panda Bears are still on the endangered species list, apparently some families in southwestern China are keeping them and other exotic animals as pets.

NovoCure, an Israeli medical device company, has just released positive data from its Phase III clinical trail of its electric helmet, the NovoTTF-100A.  This 'helmet' looks exactly like what it is - a cap full of electrodes that is intended to zap spreading brain cancer cells before they multiply and eventually kill patients with recurrent glioblastomas (GBM), the most deadly of brain cancers.

Though there are plenty of cool-looking diabetes ID bracelets available for kids, they are often left at home, mostly just forgotten. In frustration, two diabetes education nurses came up with the idea of another form of rapid alert identification, in case a child with diabetes has an emergency: a 'short-acting' tattoo!

The houses aren't very big, but they're enough to give a dog some shelter and... a place to call home, temporarily, one hopes.  The shanty town within the southern Brazilian city of Caxias do Sul, where the dog houses are located, is called a favela, like the shanty towns built for displaced persons in almost all of Brazil's large cities.

Without a doubt The Walt Disney Company is a master in the marketing arena.  And for Star Wars Weekends, it proves to be a Jedi Master.

Get it?  Yeah, I know... that was lame.  But the ad campaign makes up for it!

It just so happens that Roeland Otten is a graphic and media designer by trade, but his new ABChairs might just take his career on a new path.  These sharp new san serif alphabet chairs looked like they're ready for icon-dom, literally, if not figuratively.  The best news is that Otten wants to produce the ABChairs for the mass market!

Wouldn't it be great if robots could lead fish and other wildlife away from the Gulf oil spill before they got a drop of oil on them?  A mechanical engineering professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University has a dream that his robot fish can do that and much more.

We've featured cat scratchers of all kinds, but this is the first one you can put together in so many different patterns.  Moderncat Studio has created a unique scratching post using corrugated cardboard vertically on a standing base, when it is usually reserved for horizontal scratchers.  Plus, the Scratch Tower offers lots of design possibilities to intrigue you and your cat.

Design has a big impact on the environment, but today, most responsible designers put the 'environment' in their plans and try to avoid leaving a footprint.  This is especially true in the design of new Materials, one of the categories featured in the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum's exhibit, Why Design Now, The National Design Triennial.

An internationally known chemical biologist, Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, researcher, entrepreneur, teacher, and mentor, from the University of California at Berkeley, has won the most prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize for $500,000, dubbed the 'Oscar for Inventors.'  This award recognizes individuals who translate their inventions and innovations into technologies that improve our world.