Shi Shuchi and Bai Wanjun have designed the Cute Case, a compact and portable electric vehicle that can double as a suitcase. The lightweight and efficient vehicle is a stylish design for the electric vehicle that will dominate our roadways in the future. The electric vehicle can also be used as a trolley case and a suitcase, and can even be charged on buses or even on subway cars. Not only is the Cute Case eco-friendly, but it is a smart and stylish way of getting around a busy urban environment.
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In the future, real estate for parking will be scarce, and people may need to find a new method of parking and driving an automobile. Roman Mistuik, an industrial design student at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, has designed a solution to this plausible problem: the Peugeot Metromorph Concept, a car that is able to travel vertically alongside buildings, and take a parking spot at your apartment window.
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In the future, the term ‘ziggurat’ will no longer refers to the temple towers of the ancient Mesopotamian: Timelinks, a Dubai-based pioneering environmental design company, has chosen it to describe the sustainable city of the future. Using the basic idea of a pyramid structure, Timelinks has created renderings of a 100% self-sustainable and totally environmentally friendly super-structure. The city is planned to house more than 1 million inhabitants and will be a true architectural colossus.
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As pollution becomes an ever-increasing problem, people are finding new and creative ways of checking pollution levels and creating awareness of environmental problems. A collaboration of Diffus, Alexandra Institute, The Danish Design School, and Forster Rohner has produced the Climate Dress, which responds to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Powered by the LilyPad Arduino microprocessor and a carbon dioxide detector, the high-fashion dress emits light patterns depending on the concentration of CO2.
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“Civilization is not a static state. It’s a process that’s constantly going on.” For futurist Jacque Fresco, the great commitment of future design is to foresee, integrate, and to influence these changes in a way that improves the quality of life for both humans and the environment.
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Very few men exist that have succeeded, with their inventions and ideas, in leaving a significant mark on humanity’s history. Watching the Jacque Fresco’s interview with Larry King in 1974, a person is left with the impression of finding himself looking at a modern Leonardo da Vinci. The designs and projects that he shows to the public quickly reveal the personality of a great visionary of the future. Fresco is both a scientists, an architect, a designer, and an engineer; but most importantly he is a great philosopher, a man who has spent nearly a century studying our society and elaborating ideas that support and increase the well-being of mankind.
Beyond having taken part in projects having to do with both technology and science (from automated vehicles to biomedical equipment, in order to create real self-sustainable cities), he is also the founder of the Venus Project. The Venus Project is an organization that proposes a feasible plan of action for social change. Since 1975, Jacque has dedicated his life to social design in concrete ways, by promoting books, teaching at universities, and explaining his project to whomever wants to believe in a new civilization that is based on the wellbeing of mankind.
One day we will buy ourselves an apartment in a floating city. The city will be self-sustainable, energy efficient, and will have no negative impact on the environment. This is not a scene from a science-fiction movie; this is the world that Jacque Fresco has in mind. And this world is possible to create, even today. A world where students and researchers will be able to attend university underwater, and look out a window in order to observe the natural ecosystems of the ocean. According to the “social designer and futurist”, as Fresco likes to call himself, humanity already has in its hands the necessary tools to innovate and reconstruct our world. Science and technology alone are not enough: it is necessary to have an optimistic view, and the will to completely redesign our culture and our way of life.
On the Venus Project’s website, Fresco invites everyone to not dream with eyes open, because for the first time in human history we have the possibility to choose: to continue to destroy the our planet, or to carry out the dreams of the great men of the past.
It is important to think smart and read smart. Helen Walters, the editor of BusinessWeek, has already done half of the work for us, by outlining the 19 best innovation and design books written in 2009. Our top 10 list highlights the best of the best in innovation and design thinking.
What do contemporary T-shirt graphics, Brooklyn-based design companies, and animated short films have in common? For one thing, they’ve each grabbed the attention of Helen Walters, editor of Innovation and Design at BusinessWeek Magazine. Helen has used each of these diverse topics to illustrate the ability innovative design techniques have to change the world around us.
Recently, Helen has shifted her focus from producing original work to publicizing and critiquing the work of others. Her survey of the 19 best innovation and design books written in 2009 is a helpful guide for anyone looking to become more informed on this year’s innovation innovations, for lack of a better phrase. 10 of these books stood out to us as especially interesting or unique:
Change by Design by Tim Brown – a persuasive argument for the necessity of maintaining a well-functioning design department to succeed in tomorrow’s business climate.
The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin – a practically applicable guide to creating and maintaining a quality design department written by one of the most respected people in the field.
A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business by Hartmut Esslinger – Frog Design’s founder’s personal entertaining and informative anecdotes of his time spent at companies including Apple, Disney, and SAP.
Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean by Roberto Verganti – a revolutionary look at the field that focuses on companies’ ability to manipulate markets by using innovative design to alter customer expectations.
I Miss My Pencil by Martin Bone and Kara Johnson – an exercise in innovative design itself, this uniquely formatted book emphasizes the non-traditional aspects of the field in a very interesting and accessible manner
Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan – an executive’s handy-book to implementing innovative designs without creating excessive risk written by professors from Columbia and Wharton.
The Age of the Unthinkable, Why the New World Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo – a survey of disruptive innovation as it has manifested itself in the business community and the world at large, emphasizing its inevitability and potential to be positive.
Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich – two Wharton professors’ academic look at the way innovation can be encouraged and managed through the use of certain business practices.
Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones – a persuasion piece arguing that brilliant, difficult people are going to be the primary source of innovative and economic growth in tomorrow’s economy.
Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World by Warren Berger – a look at individuals that the author sees as important to changing the field of innovative design, and consequently the world, that pays special attention to designer Bruce Mao
French architecture firm, Mobil M, has transformed the Plaza Nueva Drugstore in Bilbao, Spain into an artistic display of creativity and interior design. Once a dull space, this pharmacy is now both practical and beautiful.
Today even the most boring of places are experiencing a complete renovation.
Banks, supermarkets, pharmacies, and post offices are not meant to be visually appealing locations. They serve a simple purpose, to provide us with services that we need to go about our daily lives in an efficient manner. However, this is soon going to change. Architects at Mobil M have transformed the Plaza Neuva Drugstore in Bilbao, Spain into a display of artistic inspiration. The once dull location (now a vividly colored and skillfully furnished one), started an artistic revolution. A person does not usually associate a pharmacy, or other stores of this genre with beauty, it is a place people go to when their bodies are not running at optimal conditions. This innovative concept will make visiting places such as pharmacies or convenience stores a cultural experience where one can enrich his mind.
The idea of creating a wonderful interior space in a lackluster environment can have positive effects on the community, as it introduces art into more arenas of society. This artistic movement will undoubtedly spread around the globe, as the first experiment in Bilbao has been labeled a success.
Design does not have to be seen solely as creativity applied to the necessities of consumerism. Instead, it should be the vehicle and the expression of a type of thinking, of a formula of creativity that is built on three axes: desirability, feasibility and viability. The future of design must be oriented as such, as the outlook of new designers shift to collaborative “design thinking”.
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In today’s society, it is not farfetched to say that consumerism dictates many aspects of our lives. It is also not surprising that the most profitable products on the market are the most aesthetically pleasing and innovative, thanks to designers whose job it is to make products sell. Tim Brown, the CEO of the firm IDEO, a design and innovation consultancy, believes that this concept needs to change.
Tim Brown wonders when design got so small. By focusing on a design or a singular product, design has become pigeonholed into simply being a tool of consumerism. Design has become incremental and does not make the impact that it could. This does not mean, however, that making products easier to use or more attractive is a pointless endeavor; instead Brown stresses the need for “design thinking” in order to see the bigger picture.
Design thinking begins with integrative thinking, which is the ability to exploit opposing ideas and constraints to create new solutions. According to Brown, design thinking, when applied to design, is accomplished by balancing desirability (what humans needs), technical feasibility, and economic viability. Instead of focusing on the design of a singular object, we should be using design thinking as an approach to solve problems and create new solutions. Brown also believes that smaller design is a recent phenomenon and that design now stands for image, fashion, and aesthetics, when it should stand for innovation.
Is design getting big again? Looking around at the latest changes in the world, one would be inclined to say yes. Design needs to start with what humans need, not just what new objects would look good on someone’s shelf. Thanks to current technology, companies are now able to use design to help tackle world problems by taking into account diverse cultures. While design is useful in both a large and smaller realm, it should start once again living up to its full potential.
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