The renovated Hermitage Museum by Hans van Heeswijk Architects, top and the interior exhibition layout by Merkx + Girod, pictured bottom. Photo credit: Luuk Kramer

The Dutch Design Awards competition of 2010 have jointly awarded the architect, interior designer and landscape architect of Hermitage Amsterdam with the Best Cultural Interior in the main Spatial category.

Hans van Heeswijk Architects, were responsible for restoring the Amstelhof elderly home into the museum, Merkx+Girod, designed the main interior spaces and opening exhibition and the landscape architect Michael van Gessel, designed the outdoor public spaces and courtyard of the Hermitage Museum.

Dutch Design Awards are given to the best of the best in the field of Dutch design and comprise of the competition, the international travelling exhibition and the production of the Dutch Design Yearbook 2010.

Buro North's wayfinding project at Falls Creek, Australia. Photo Credits: Daniel Columbo

A great wayfinding project from Australian-based multi-disciplinary design practice Büro North has recently been awarded an AGDA Distinction Award for their signage system at Falls Creek Ski Village in Australia.

This distinctive tree-like system has been designed to help visitors navigate the complex ski resort providing information in a wide variety of directions to suit the village layout and changing seasonal functions. Each modular component has been cast to withstand the freeze/thaw temperatures of the environment at Falls Creek and can be connected in such a way as to adapt to the changing snowfall and the restructuring of the resort.

In June of this year, we wrote about Vac from the Sea, an initiative by Electrolux to raise awareness of the huge amount of plastic waste in the oceans by deploying teams to collect some of it and turn it into a series of vacuums. Today they unveiled the series of 5, pictured top. Each vacuum represents one ocean, from left to right: the North Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Baltic Sea.

The chassis are visually quite nice, and though this isn't currently worked out for high volume production, but, according to Electrolux, the "quality and logistics needed for cleaning and sorting ocean plastic makes it difficult to use in mass production." For now, they are planning to auction off one of the vacuum cleaners, using the revenue for continued research into the initiative.

Guest post by Twan Hofman. Images by Lisa Klappe.

At the premiere night of Eat, Drink, Design, a pop-up expo restaurant organized by designers Annemoon Geurts and Koen Rijnbeek (Moon/en/Co) in collaboration with chef Edwin Severijn, the Dutch Design Award jury were the first to enjoy a week of fresh cuisine amongst the work of 28 designers.

It's impressive how this local design studio managed to create such a great atmosphere within five days. The venue breaths quite a bit of class, although it is located in a huge empty office space downtown Eindhoven, DDW's host city. The exhibition contains established designers, Dutch Award nominees and young talent. And the kitchen smell is promising as well.

One of the reasons cars cost what they do is because they're made with a lot of stamped steel and aluminum, and those materials, not to mention the tooling they require, ain't cheap. So Canadian designer Darren McKeage and his company, Motive Industries Inc., are attempting to skirt those manufacturing costs by building a car from biocomposite materials derived from hemb fiber. Called the Kestrel, the car was unveiled to the public last month.

The car's design features bio-composite materials and innovative tooling and part-molding techniques that Motive says will permit profitable manufacture of the Kestrel at smaller initial volumes than traditional stamped-steel or aluminum vehicles. "The cost to tool a traditional vehicle is in the hundreds of millions [of dollars]," explains company president Nathan Armstrong. "The techniques we are using will allow us to scale up the tooling and manufacturing process as demand increases, with ramp-up costs affordable for a new company...."

...Composites also will increase impact absorption and rust resistance. "Composite materials have been used in advanced applications for many years because of [their] relative light weight and ability to absorb impact loads," says Armstrong.

Designed to run on a lithium-ion battery, the lightweight car (under 2,000 lbs) is slated to see production in 2012.

via composites world

It's amusing to see cutlery that comes with instructions. Konstantin Slawinski's Join, designed by Carsten Schelling, Sven Rudolph and Ralph Webermann, is a cutlery set inspired by a Japanese toy made from three sticks that fit together by means of clever joinery.

While the cuts look simple, undoing the utensils will require careful and focused fiddling. Now you can provide your family members or guests with a mental challenge they have to complete before they're allowed to eat.

Mini drew a lot of interesting concepts for their design competition launched back in March, which sought to draw ideas for things to place on the center rail that runs the length of the Countryman's interior. So many, in fact, that Mini took the winning concepts and presented them, prototype-style, at the Paris Motor Show.

Top prize went to Berlin-based Satoshi Nakamura for his in-car fireplace, and the runner-up was UK-based Chris Townsend for his in-car karaoke concept. On the competition's website you can see all of the entries, ranging from an in-car marble bowling alley and a projector that turns the Countryman into a self-contained drive-in when it's time to pull over. There's just about 1,000 entries to browse through.

The Bangkok International Gift and Homeware Fair has wrapped up earlier this week, and we took a glance at what the self declared "Soul and Style of the Orient" had on show. If that title evokes exotic expectations to you, frankly - you would have been disappointed.

Because, although taking the risk of sounding arrogant, it was not exactly swamped with inspired pieces, that would withstand a proper scan from a design perspective. It rather seemed an accumulation of generic goods, some of them rather "cute" in a gadgety kind of way, but also a lot of stuff that created this "deja vue" moment, because you had seen it soooo many times before - only in other versions by other designers. Not to mention the countless stuff that simply did not in any way encourage you to stop and look.

But still, there were some lights that shone even brighter in this underwhelming jungle of mediocrity. One island of such projects was definitely the stand of the winning projects of the Design Excellence Award, as shown in the pictures in this post.

From top to bottom (without implying any judgement, this is a purely random order), these are the Melt Stapler by Siam Yamato Steel - steel furniture made from I-Beam scrap (but we recommend to ask a structural engineer for advice, before you put this in your living room - it is very heavy), followed by the multi-angle LED Lamp Leer by Aesthetic Studio.

The third picture from the top is the Ribbon steel hanging device by Stil, and the picture below shows the I-Tube water faucet, designed by Bathroom Design. More posts and also a gallery on selected jewels of the Bangkok show will follow shortly. Sawasdee!

Art Director
Alternative Apparel
Los Angeles, California

Alternative Apparel is looking for a talented Art Director to join their Los Angeles staff. This position reports to the Creative Director. The Art Director must have a strong creative vision, a high level of design sophistication, and strong typography and conceptualization skills. The position requires significant experience in InDesign, as well as a keen eye for fashion design. Strong organization and communication skills are essential. Candidates must have 3-5+ years of design experience, managerial experience, and a thorough knowledge of InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and MS Office.

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I had counted Sony down, but I guess I can't quite count 'em out: Engadget reports the once-dominant electronics giant is soon to release a PlayStation Phone, which, if successful, ought to help them reclaim some relevance in the gadget landscape.

It's kind of an interesting gamble, as Apple's iDevices are clearly dominating the microgaming space with their touchscreens. Will anyone still want to play pocket games using little physical buttons, and will Sony be able to deliver games in an easy, iTMS-like way? Stay tuned--Engadget's claiming a 2011 or even 2010 release.

After spotting Steve Wozniak's bad-ass "I could cut steak with this thing" metal business card on Cult of Mac, I believe I managed to track down the company that makes them. Judging by the background of their sample photos, it seems the card came from U.K.-based PlasmaDesign, which produces and sells stainless steel business cards in the U.S. and the U.K.

The cards are created through a combination of photochemical etching and good ol' cutting (we assume stamping), depending on the design, and if regular stainless steel etched into two shades is too boring for you, PlasmaDesign can also tint the metal into seven different shades using a complicated process called electrophoresis, which I could not adequately explain to you if I had a gun to my head.

The salient selling points of a metal business card are that they stand out and that recipients are presumably less likely to throw them away, but I wonder two things: 1) What is the environmental impact, vs. paper cards, and 2) Do these things set off airport metal detectors?

We just caught wind of a new kind of 3D-Interface Controller, the Axsotic 3D Spherical Mouse, which allows a user to rotate objects in modelspace as though you were holding them, while drawing and clicking with your other, an experience likened by the designers to working on a 3D tablet. In the video above, the mouse is demonstrated in a character design scenario.

We'd love to hear your initial thoughts. Would this change the way you work for the better? Let us know in the comments.

When I used to have a car in Manhattan I considered myself an expert at navigating the traffic sprawl, as I knew the city like the back of my hand and could usually work my little five-speed VW to the front of any pack. I'd often joke to my friends that Manhattan, due to all the one-way streets and congestion, was a place where you could often get to your destination faster by initially moving in the opposite direction. (No one ever laughed.)

The concept of going the wrong way to reduce overall trip duration can also be seen in the "diverging diamond interchange," a new (to the U.S.) form of highway intersection that reduces "conflict points" by asking drivers to temporarily switch to the "wrong" side of the road. It's kind of complicated, but see if you can follow along:

...The diverging diamond interchange allows for two-phase operation at all signalized intersections within the interchange. This is a significant improvement in safety, since no left turns must clear opposing traffic and all movements are discrete, with most controlled by traffic signals.

Additionally, the design can improve the efficiency of an interchange, as the lost time for various phases in the cycle can be redistributed as green time; there are only two clearance intervals (the time for traffic signals to change from green to yellow to red) instead of the six or more found in other interchange designs.

Still confused? Perhaps this visualization will help, where the little intersecting red lines signify traffic lights:

Pioneered in France, the first U.S. diverging diamond interchange was constructed last year in Springfield, Missouri.

Lately, we've been trying to find ways off the screen, back into the physical world of things and interactions, so we were pretty jazzed to come across The Open Source Digest this morning, a low budget publication of freely available, out of copyright material from the public domain. About 50 Swedish Kroner, it seems at first a bit backwards to be charging for free material, but this speaks to the value of curation and distillation—editors Anders Stockman, Matthew Whittington and Robert ågren have put together a collection that one can consume in solitude, by a lake, near a fire, or in a library—this is valuable.

Included in the first issue are Leo Tolstoy's "Three Questions," "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" by William Morris, an excerpt of News from Nowhere (or an Epoch of Rest): Being Some Chapters from an Utopian Romance by Saki, and more.

You can get it from the moving book cabinet built by VARV, an autonomous bookshop project dedicated to the distribution of artist's books and critical readers.
If you don't happen to run across it, you can order online via email.

via manystuff

The Zollverein Bottle-Cabinets is a quick and clever little reuse project made by Rogier Martens for the Gast Gastgeber-Store pop-up installation in Essen, Germany earlier this fall. The shelving units rely on the counterforces between a strap in tension and used glass bottles in compression. The resulting structure has a casual and open feeling, slightly tenuous, but without the possibility of actually toppling over.

More after the jump.

Starting Out is a series about designers who have recently struck out on their own. More than a string of studio visits, the articles profile talented, risk-taking professionals all around the world. We hope their anecdotes will inspire your own entrepreneurial spirit.

In our third installment, we visit Alice Wang in Taipei, Taiwan. We met her first at the world famous dumpling house Din Tai Fung, and then at her studio, where after only one year, she has a large team of employees under her wing and a brand new magazine to boot.

Top: Alice Wang and her studio bunch, wearing a set of laser cut glasses made to surprise Alice on her birthday. Bottom: An image of Controlled Experiments, a series of design projects in the spirit of science fairs.

Core77: Alice, tell us about your studio practice.

Alice Wang:: I have a background in product design and interaction design and a childhood dream to become an artist, so as a result, I think what I'm doing now is a mixture of all three.

Instead of designing products that solves problem, I use design as a language to illustrate stories, social trends, common issues seen among us; to observe and remind people about issues left hidden or forgotten; use parody and irony to ask people to laugh and self-reflect.

Alice takes us on a tour of her impressive studio, just a year old.

C77: How and why did you first start out?

AW: I started out by accident. I had to ship my project to Milan for Salone Satellite and it was too heavy to ship it as an individual, so I registered my company asap just so I can get those boxes to Europe.

C77: Your practice is very diverse. Tell us about all its different facets.

AW: My company is loosely divided into 5 parts:

Research & Collectables: On the side, we work on a wide range of self-initiated research projects, and sometimes, the outcome turns into a design collectable or an installation for gallery and museums.

The Binder: A new magazine we started on April Fool's Day this year, it mainly focuses on art, design, fashion, psychology, social trend analysis. The magazine has three holes and comes with a binder hoping to encourage readers to tear out pages and reorganize them when archiving them into the Binder.

Controlled Experiments: With this series, we're aiming to merge the process of scientific experiments into the design process. Each project starts off with a hypothesis and goes through data collection and observation before it researches the analysis and conclusion procedure. We're not sure what the outcome of each product will be as it may be influenced by the participants and the data collected.

Such ignominy. A press release heralding the IDSA's Catalyst Case Studies winners lists the IDSA's full title, in the freaking headline, as the "International Design Society of America."

Industrial Design, people.

In any case, the four chosen case studies are as follows:

- Toyota Prius' design created a new car category by combining business opportunity, environmental impact and a social solution that changed attitudes about the potential of hybrids.

- Siemens e.cam is a nuclear camera with an open gantry that allows easy access to both detectors for imaging of patients on gurneys and wheelchairs or in a standing position. This patient-centered design is an example of business leadership aligning good design with business strategy.

- Kohler 9/11 Mobile Shower was created for the workers and volunteers at the World Trade Center located at Ground Zero. It was selected because it was a simple and appropriate shower solution as well as a great example of corporate citizenship.

- The MiniMed Infusion pump, a device that helps diabetic patients manage insulin without daily injections, was selected for demonstrating the power to deliver healthier living and corporate financial performance by realizing the important connection between medical product design and a patient's daily needs.

The full case studies, each chosen for "[holding] a real connection to facilitating positive change and [helping to] capture design's ability to deliver strategic value while inspiring the profession's future," will be on sale as PDFs and MP3s in early 2011.

Orbitz Worldwide/Away.com
Designer
Washington, DC

We need a designer who brings a well-developed aesthetic and the usual tool kit: knowledge of typography, grid layouts, information hierarchy, interactive design, and a keen eye for the important details. You should also have a solid understanding of web technologies including HTML, CSS, and recent developments in those areas. You're willing to experiment and push beyond your limitations.

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After seeing the new 2011 Jetta commercial above (by creative agency Red Urban and production company 1stAveMachine), where a car covered in design sketches blows away to reveal the new body, we were reminded of something: A few months ago we had the pleasure of meeting VW Group Design Chief Walter de'Silva--remember his Leica?--and over dinner he was kind enough to sketch out the new Jetta's face for those sitting around the table. (A cocktail napkin would've been too cliche so he used a pad of paper.) We've got it here at 2x speed:

Life Edited, the movement and challenge to reduce our environmental impact while simplifying our lives at home, has officially launched its challenge at Jovoto, the creative collaboration platform. To better understand, here's a nicely summed up 2 minute introduction from Treehugger and Life Edited founder Graham Hill.