Safe to say that the most hated chores are either doing laundry or doing the dishes. There is something about warm, dryer sheet scented laundry that kind of makes it worth it, so doing dishes is the most annoying household task in my list. I also feel like dishwashers are so awkwardly located, you have to bend too often and that can be a problem if you have a physical disability or if you are over the age of 26 because you have spent a good amount of time slouching over your devices. To make life easier for us all, Fotile has designed a 3-in-1 dishwasher that actually fits in your sink! Yes, that is correct – your sink is now a place for dirty as well as clean dishes.
This clever design hides your dishwasher and dryer elegantly by welding it to your stainless steel sink. The dishwasher has a larget fillet that facilitates accelerated rotation of water flow to improve the efficiency of wash cycles. Another great perk of it being fitted in your sink is that it reduces the hassle of cleaning inside the appliance. It also has a flat embedded ‘lid’ which makes it easy for you to keep your countertop clean while not sacrificing surface space. Apart from killing 99.99% of bacteria from the dishes, it also doubles up as a fruit and vegetable purifier. Using ultrasonic technology and a turbulent spray, it removes 90% of pesticide residue from your produce. This dishwasher claims to have no blind spots – 360-degree cleaning and drying!
The Fotile dishwasher is perfect for any home but especially urban homes because they don’t come with appliances (trust me, I had to apartment hunt in Manhattan which meant I chose dishwasher over having a living room), even more so when they are traditional bulky washers. Not just small apartments, but any home could benefit from space optimization with this in-sink dishwasher. It is also uses resources more efficiently and cuts the time + energy taken by existing dishwashers into half! Clean, convenient, and (very) cool.
The words “Design” and “Better” are bound pretty closely together. There is no design if it isn’t making a situation or an experience better, solving a problem, enriching a life, or transforming an industry. Designers are always striving to make the future better than the past, and the LEXUS DESIGN AWARD is committed to rewarding designs and designers that are pushing the boundaries to imagine and ideate for a better future for humanity as well as for the planet. In fact, “Design for a Better Tomorrow” is the underlying theme of the Lexus Design Award 2020. Currently in its 8th year, this year’s Lexus Design Award looks at solutions that have a uniquely positive impact on society, humanity, and in the process, to reward a new generation of designers for their impactful ideas. The Lexus Design Award’s core objective has always been to foster great ideas and great talent. Creating the perfect environment for a design to grow, Lexus helps engineer ideas into real, impactful solutions. The brand’s strong association with design and with innovation helps it accelerate ideas to achieve their full potential. Apart from accelerating, developing, and promoting design projects, the Lexus Design Award helps kickstart design careers too, with exclusive mentorships from international design stalwarts, funding for prototypes (up to 3 million Japanese Yen or $25,000) and the opportunity to have your work judged by the biggest figures in design in the final Grand Prix competition. Past Judges include architects Sir David Adjaye and Shigeru Ban, famed curator Aric Chen, and artist-designer Jaime Hayon. This year, the Grand Prix winner will be announced on September 1st on the Lexus Design Award website.
The award process for the Lexus Design Award is pretty unique too. After the entry submission phase, 6 Grand Prix finalists are selected to be mentored at the brand space INTERSECT BY LEXUS in New York by a panel of globally renowned creators with established design practices and decades of experience in the field. This year Joe Doucet (Founder, Joe Doucet x Partners), Bethan Gray (Creative Director, Bethan Gray Design), Philippe Malouin (Director, Philippe Maluin Studio), and Shohei Shigematsu (Partner-Director OMA New York) served as mentors. Mentors help define and refine ideas, turning them into world-class products which are then prototyped and incubated by the Lexus Design Award. The projects and their refined prototypes are then presented and judged by an esteemed panel of judges in a virtual Grand Prix selection event in August. Winners, apart from being able to showcase the award in their resume, also benefit from having been mentored by world-class designers, having their design taken from concept to finished prototype, being judged by design and tech icons like John Maeda (technologist & author of The Laws Of Simplicity), Jeanne Gang (award-winning architect), Paola Antonelli (Senior Curator at MoMA), and Simon Humphries (Head of Toyota and Lexus Global Design), and having their work gain unparalleled exposure through the programme.
Entries for the 2020 Lexus Design Award came from as many as 79 countries, spanning across the categories of Industrial Design, Architecture, Technology/Engineering, Interior Design, and Fashion Design. As the participants currently go through their prototyping phase, here’s a look at the 6 Grand Prix finalist designs.
Biocraft attempts at transforming mundane objects into living ones that interact with the environment. Originally named Bio.Scales, the Biocraft is a revolutionary material that combines natural biopolymers with emerging technology to create a new material that possesses capabilities like being able to extract CO2 from the air, rid the ambient environment of pollutants, or even disseminate nutrients into the atmosphere. Created by Paul and Garrett Sutherlin Santo from Los Angeles, Biocraft hopes to eventually replace materials like thermoplastics, eventually creating regular products that don’t just exist to solve a problem, but rather serve a higher purpose by being ‘living entities’ that have a positive impact on human health and the environment.
Feltscape by Théophile Peju & Salvatore Cicero
Think of the Feltscape as an isolation chamber that imitates the feeling of being within a womb. Designed by UK-based Théophile Peju & Salvatore Cicero, the Feltscape is a ‘breathing cloud’ made of felt and recycled bio-plastic with an innovative robotic fabrication process. Equipped with sensors and kinetic mechanisms, the Feltscape can sense a user’s breathing patterns, allowing the isolation chamber’s smart membrane to react to its user’s breath. Creating a perfect atmosphere for reflection, meditation, and an escape from the immediate world, Feltscape provides a cocoon-like isolation experience that helps slowly and surely calm people down. Its organic design reflects inspiration from cocoons too!
Flash Pak by Yaokun Wu
Akin to having a fire-extinguisher mounted on the walls of buildings, Flash Pak by Yaokun Wu of China aims at providing flood-prone areas with instant access to life-jackets. Designed to be attached to lamp-poles in areas susceptible to flash floods, the FlashPak sits in its protective housing at regular times, but in the event of a flood, naturally rises to the surface thanks to the life-jacket’s innate buoyancy. Floods, now an unfortunately common by-product of climate change, displaces millions each year, resulting in thousands of deaths annually. Solutions like the Flash Pak can turn a lamp-post (or any regular post) into a potential life-saving zone, giving people instant access to life-saving jackets during times of need. New jackets can easily be placed back in their housing once the flood subsides, and the Flash Pak’s automatic deployment during a flash flood makes it an incredibly effective, life-changing solution.
L.I.C.K. by Irina Samoilova
A quirky example of biomimicry, the L.I.C.K. by Irina Samoilova from Russia is a portable body cleaner that takes inspiration from the way felines clean themselves. The L.I.C.K. is modeled on a cat’s tongue, with a soft cleaning surface with unique papillae that helps people who are unable to have a bath to clean themselves. Designed for people with no immediate access to water, or with injuries/bandages/casts that require being kept away from water, the L.I.C.K. provides a unique tactile experience that helps keep the body clean. Designed to work just the way a cat’s tongue does, the L.I.C.K. can simply be run across the body while its specially designed papillae and U-shaped cavities help lift dirt off the body (while feeling great to the touch too!)
Open Source Communities by BellTower
What if architecture, like software, could be open-sourced so that people can collectively develop something better together? The Open Source Communities, a Grand Prix finalist from Kenya-based BellTower, hopes to create universally available open-source home-design plans that can be used to design communities in developing and underdeveloped countries. These open-sourced homes can help provide a safe and secure haven for people in developing areas, while helping designers leverage the power of open-source planning to effectively allocate resources, allowing communities to even be sustainable, energy-efficient, and eco-friendly by design!
Pursewit by Aqsa Ajmal
The Pursewit is uniquely positioned to help the visually impaired not just be independent, but also develop vocational skills that help them make a living. Designed by Pakistan-based designer, Aqsa Ajmal, after her friend lost her vision in an accident, the Pursewit makes sewing more accessible with a design that’s built around ease-of-use with an approach that’s immediately intuitive and with a relatively shallow learning curve. The design scales the form of the sewing machine down, making it less cumbersome while also being simpler and safer. Ajmal hopes that the Pursewit will go beyond just helping the visually impaired be more independent by sewing or fixing their clothes, by also allowing them to take on a skill set that helps them earn a daily wage and be financially independent too.
The Grand Prix trophy was designed by Hideki Yoshimoto.
Conceptualized in 2017, and currently on the road to its fourth edition in 2020, Asia Design Prize has really evolved from an idea to a massive awards program that’s been supported by and organized with partnership from design institutions and professionals around the world. Asia Design Prize’s biggest success story is its judging procedure, an elaborate, accurate, and fair judging system that gives everyone from students to professionals, and even multi-disciplinary design studios equal preference, judging the quality of the idea and the project in the most ethical and fair way possible.
The Asia Design Prize’s judging procedure relies on its strong jury of 42 design professionals, design educators, and design journalists from 14 countries. Projects are presented to the jury members without revealing the designer’s name, nationality, organization, or any other personal information. The process occurs in two rounds, with different judges in each round looking at the work, resulting in an evaluation that’s fair and accurate. The chairman of the jury judges the top 10% of the awarded works to decide the grand winner of the Asia Design Prize for the year. At the end of the programme each year, ADP organizes an awards gala for its winners, where they receive their certificate and trophy, and also network with one another as well as with their jury panelists. Winners of the ADP award are also included in Asia Design Prize’s annual yearbook, a permanent place in the Asia Design Prize’s online exhibition, and even have their works featured in prominent design magazines and journals across the world, truly bringing attention and credibility to their work and their skill sets!
As the wheels begin moving for the Asia Design Prize 2020 competition, we thought it would be fitting to showcase some winning concepts from the last year. Cycle through to see some of our absolute favorites, but more importantly, use them as a barometer to measure the worth of your own design concepts, because come 2020, your work could win a prestigious award too!
Head to the Asia Design Prize website to know more! They’ve just announced their 2018-19 winners. You can find our favorites below!
Last Date to Register Early Bird Submission: September 30, 2019
01. TAC Air Purifier by Junku Jung
Air quality varies from place to place as much as allergies vary from person to person… so, it makes very little sense that we all have the same purification systems available to us! Designed with this in mind, the TAC air purifier provides custom air cleaning to suit you and where you live. Unlike other purifiers, it features unique filters, each dedicated to a specific type of allergen or pollutant. Live in a big city? Throw on the smog filter. Allergic to pollen? There’s a filter for that too. Simply layer the brightly colored filters to get just the right balance for you and your unique space!
02. Paprika Stool by Yoshioishikawa
The Paprika Stool has a pretty neat idea behind it. Stools, or furniture in general, occupy space even when they’re in retail, or being transported from factory to the shop. What if you could design a stool that’s deflated when transported, and inflated to be a stool only when purchased? The stool is, in principal, like a balloon with 3 legs. Made out of fabric, it remains soft and comfortable on the outside, and is filled with PU foam on the inside just minutes after it’s been purchased, so a customer can take home a soft, solid stool back home that they can sit on. The stool saves money by making logistics simpler and more efficient, and can easily be manufactured in different sizes by filling PU foam into a larger stool cover, much like filling cotton into a cushion cover or a mattress, or polystyrene balls into a beanbag!
03. Pencil Sharpener by Di Lu
If you’ve ever sharpened a pencil (and if you haven’t, what planet are you living on?), then you know how easy it is for the shavings to fly all around your desk or workspace. Unless you’re hovering over a waste bin, that discarded lead and wood can mess up your work. Designed with this in mind, this pencil sharpener by Di Lu serves as an extra collecting-vessel to gather shavings so they can be easily discarded. Simple, right?
04. Molt Chair by Taylor Cheng
Inspired by the Ming Dynasty, the Molt Chair combines western furniture design with ancient Chinese cultural values. The angular floating armrests and the chair’s front take inspiration from the thrones of Chinese emperors, while the side view looks more like the stylings of a modern rocking chair.
05. Slim Smart Washer 3 by American Standard
Designed to retrofit onto existing toilets, the SSW3 aims at easing the transition from toilet paper to a water-based cleaning system. A simple lever on the side lets you work the SSW3’s controls, pulling up for a bidet-style front-wash, or pushing down to trigger the rear shower. The system neatly integrates into existing toilets, and requires no electricity to function!
06. Veark CK01 by Daniel Ronge
Designed as a unibody tool, with a knife handle that borrows from tool design, the Veark CK01 gives knives the reverence they deserve. The knife is by far a chef’s most favored and most important tool, which is why the CK01 has such an industrial-tool-aesthetic. The CK01 blades are all manufactured in Solingen, Germany, the holy grail of knife-manufacturing and bladesmithing in all of Europe. The drop-forging technique results in each knife handle having its own individual texture, each one unique like a fingerprint, and a hardness of 58 on the Rockwell scale. And the unibody design has more to offer then just great looks: The open handle design invites your thumb to rest on the blade and pinch grip the knife like a pro. The metal blade also provides a counterbalance that allows you to maneuver the knife with ease. A singular body also means the knife is easier to maintain, with no place for food, dirt, and dust to get wedged into. A simple rinse makes the CK01 as good as new!
07. Leaf Hair Dryer by Yejin Choi, Jinah Kim & Juhyuk Yun
With an aesthetic that definitely seems new for its category, the Leaf folding hair dryer explores a completely organic, novel design direction. The standing hair-dryer occupies little to no space on your desk, docking on its contact-charging plate when not in use. The dryer’s air-barrel folds inwards, integrating with the handle to become almost monolithic, but when you fold it out, it assumes a leafy aesthetic, thanks to its white outer shell. Just lift it off its charging dock, unfold it, and begin using it for the silkiest, smoothest hair ever!
08. Hougyoku by Kenichi Ken Mizuno
Combining aspects of pottery and jewelry making, Hougyoku resembles a bird nurturing its egg. It’s a result of traditional and modern pottery techniques developed in the Japanese pottery-town of Seto. Integrating the two into a single form, the bird and egg are represented as positive and negative forms, denoted by the color schemes. The Hougyoku can be used as a sculptural element but also as a place to store small keepsakes.
09. Coat+ by Baoliyuan, Wangaihong, Maqianqian
This regular jacket has an inner expansion mechanism for pregnant women! Realizing that fashion should be more accommodating for women in their maternity period, the designers decided to reinvent the coat so that it fits women who are as well as who aren’t pregnant. It doesn’t make sense having to buy separate clothes just because you’re expecting a child, only to throw those clothes away after the child is born, right? Coat+ is a coat that women can wear all through their lives! An extra fabric attachment zips to the coat allowing you to expand it… when you don’t need the expandable attachment, you can wear it as a scarf!
While we tend to get caught up in keynote hoopla, Apple's WWDC event is about connecting with the third party developers of software for its various platforms and it highlighted a few with its annual Design Awards yesterday. While 2011's winners included standouts like Infinity Blade, selections for 2012 included high profile pics like the Paper sketchbook app for iPad, the game Limbo on OS X, National Geographic's National Parks iOS app and several others. Hit the source link to see all the winners including student projects daWindci and Little Star, along with descriptions of why they were picked. Unsurprisingly, tight integration with the various APIs and services Apple is pushing (plus a polished and widely appreciated user experience, of course) is the way to its heart -- worth keeping in mind for those hoping to be in the winner's circle for 2013.
