Designing a safe pint glass

Two revolutionary prototype pint glasses have been designed to reduce the injuries caused by glassing attacks.

The Design Out Crime project has developed two revolutionary prototype pint glasses that have been designed to reduce the injuries caused by glassing attacks. The designs represent the first major advance in pub glassware since the 1960s and feature new high-tech ways of using glass, so they feel the same as conventional glasses, but crucially do not create loose, dangerous shards if broken.

See the Design Council’s website for more details on this and other crime-related design projects.

Big ideas wanted for China’s hi-tech revolution

Wu Lulu was once a farmer with no formal education. He built low-tech robots made out of any scrap he could get his hands on.

It did not always go smoothly. On one occasion, Mr Wu, 50, mistook detonators for batteries, blowing up his house and burning his face.

But after more than two decades, his perseverance paid off.

He entered a TV competition for inventors – winning first prize, which included a cash purse.

His success ended the criticism of his neighbours who thought he should spend more time tending his crops and less time on his contraptions.

And now, Mr Wu has swapped his fields for a factory where he – and his team of 50 employees – design robots to order.

“I’m obsessed by building them,” he says.

Read the rest at BBC News – Big ideas wanted for China’s hi-tech revolution.

Check out the video on the BBC page for more. Paul Merton met Mr Wu for his Channel 5 series, Paul Merton in China, and there are plenty of videos of the robots and Mr Wu on the web, including this one:

What Does A BBC Production Designer Do?

 

 

Here’s a little secret for you: when I was younger I wanted to be a set designer. I would have been hopeless at it, given the things I made out of cardboard at the time, all parcel tape and glue everywhere, my Star Wars action figures stooping to get through doors that didn’t quite slide properly.

Anyway. We all need our dreams.

Over at the BBC blog the production designer for 32 Brinkburn Street, Andrea Hughes, has written about her experiences. Not a piece of parcel tape in sight. She says:

Initially, the producer, director and I proposed a colour tone to run throughout the entire piece. It was important that the drama would flow when cutting between the two time periods.

The colour palette … ensured that the drama felt like one piece rather than two stories merely stitched together.

[...]

The period props were sourced from a few places in Manchester (prop houses, coin collectors etc) but in particular we used a prop house in Lincolnshire which has several floors of props covering several periods.

… They can supply almost anything from wallpaper to carpet, to washing powder boxes to lollipops.

[...]

We had to choose our props wisely in order to keep to our budget and I chose not to use authentic period wallpaper as this is particularly expensive.

Instead I searched around to find modern wallpaper of the correct tone for our piece and which had a flavour of the period – rather than merely being a historical reproduction.

This would then be aged down – a painting term meaning to dirty the walls with dark washes of paint and which can be done lightly or heavily depending on the effect I’m after, ie, the attic set needed to feel like it hadn’t been lived in for decades and was subsequently heavily aged down.

Read the rest of her piece over at the BBC TV blog

I’m not jealous.

3D printing: The printed world

The Economist (I told you it was worth looking at!) carried a great cover article on 3D printing last week, and you can read it in full on their website. Here’s a snippet:

FILTON, just outside Bristol, is where Britain’s fleet of Concorde supersonic airliners was built. In a building near a wind tunnel on the same sprawling site, something even more remarkable is being created. Little by little a machine is “printing” a complex titanium landing-gear bracket, about the size of a shoe, which normally would have to be laboriously hewn from a solid block of metal. Brackets are only the beginning. The researchers at Filton have a much bigger ambition: to print the entire wing of an airliner.

 

Far-fetched as this may seem, many other people are using three-dimensional printing technology to create similarly remarkable things. These include medical implants, jewellery, football boots designed for individual feet, lampshades, racing-car parts, solid-state batteries and customised mobile phones. Some are even making mechanical devices. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Peter Schmitt, a PhD student, has been printing something that resembles the workings of a grandfather clock. It took him a few attempts to get right, but eventually he removed the plastic clock from a 3D printer, hung it on the wall and pulled down the counterweight. It started ticking.

Read the rest at 3D printing: The printed world | The Economist.

The Glass Wedding Dress

Cinderella may have had glass slippers for the ball, but this is an entire wedding outfit made of glass. It can be found at the Turner Glass Collection in the University of Sheffield. The museum is a homage to Professor W.E.S. Turner who was a professor of physical chemistry in Sheffield in the 1900s. He was concerned with the lack of manufacturing capabilities in glass during the first world war and as well as studying the scientific aspects of the material he also studied the craft of glass-making, including glass blowing (which if you’ve never seen done, is well worth hunting down.)

In 1943 Professor Turner married Helen Nairn Monro, a glass artist and engraver who later established the Department of Glass Design at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1950s. The Glasgow company Glass Fibres Ltd showed the esteem with which both Turner and Monro were held by manufacturing a wedding dress, hat, shoes and handbag – all made from glass fibre. (You can see a detail from the sleeve below).

As well as being enormously expensive to make, the dress was also very heavy, and due to the fibres in one of the heels breaking, the bride was forced to endure a great deal of pain while wearing them.

According to a BBC article, where you can see images of other exhibits, the Turner Museum of Glass is free and open to the public every day except Bank Holidays, from 9am-4pm. It can be found on E Floor of the University of Sheffield’s Sir Robert Hadfield Building on Portobello Road, Sheffield.

(Photos from BBC Sheffield)

Teaching Design For Change

Designer Emily Pilloton moved to rural Bertie County, in North Carolina, to engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation. She’s teaching a design-build class called Studio H that engages high schoolers’ minds and bodies while bringing smart design and new opportunities to the poorest county in the state.

Watch more TEDtalk videos online or subscribe in iTunes for standard and high definition video podcasts of selected talks.

Proposed Cigarette Product Warning Labels in the USA

 

 

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released some proposed graphic health warnings that are due to appear on cigarette packets by the end of June 2011.

Some of them are quite hard-hitting, but the most interesting thing is the size of the image on the package. The tobacco companies won’t like the fact their brand will be situated near these – in fact I wonder how tempted they might be just to sell unbranded cigarettes instead?

One of the images is more positive (below) – which do you think would be most effective?

 

 

 

Jan Chipchase on the power of design

Jan Chipchase, executive creative director of global insights at Frog Design, speaking on the power and importance of design at the Activate 2010 conference.

Want to Know What Dundee Master of Design Students Do?

If you’re in Dundee this weekend, come along to the opening of the Master of Design degree show. This year’s students will be showing off their final projects, and there are some really interesting and inspiring ones, showing off the diversity of design research and practice.

You can see explanations of all the projects on the MDes website, Some of my personal favourites include Ceara McCurdy’s Spoonful of Movies, a project taking film editing and story telling in to primary schools; Danielle Hu’s Making Culture, another school-based project that let children explore Japanese culture through the making and decoration of kimonos; and two interactive projects from Jamie Shek and Ryan McCleod – the former exploring how social networking tools can help charities improve active participation among donors, and the latter a tool to help people with speech difficulties add nuance to their computer-based communications.

A feature of these projects is that they are “real” – students haven’t just created things to stick on walls in response to a brief, they developed their own projects and worked with the people they would affect. Yue Xu, for example, got stuck in to the local community, helping them to regenerate local land in to a community garden. Ryan worked as a personal helper to one of the people he was designing for. Danielle and Ceara ran lessons and workshops with children, parents and teachers. Liwei Liu got Dundonians practicing tai Chi outdoors (as she puts it, Dundee is Scotland’s sunniest city after all!) and, particularly impressive, Emma Gault trained to be a suicide prevention counsellor to get to understand her target audience better.

Now I’ve mentioned those I want to mention them all so you’ll have to go and visit the site, or come along on Saturday when the course director, Hazel White, will talk about the projects in more detail. Some of the students will also be running workshops, so if you want to make your own origami kimono, come along!

The MDes programme at Dundee is one of the most inspiring courses I’ve come across – now obviously I’m biased, but it really does develop imaginative designers from a range of backgrounds (we’ve got graduates in jewellery, interactive design, graphics, stage design and more) all ready to use their abilities to make a real difference in the world, often far removed from their original discipline.

The exhibition opens on Saturday 28 August and runs until 3rd September, and also includes DJCAD’s other taught postgraduate programmes.

On the Saturday, there’ll be project talks, coffee and cakes (though not if you get there after me) from 11.00 until 12.30. And then at 1.00pm until 2.00pm there are workshops on kimono printing and social gardening. I might pop along and try my hand at a bit of printing…

As if that’s not enough there’s an evening event on Friday 3 September from 6-8pm where you can talk to the students and staff over a civilised glass of wine.

The exhibition and talks are all open to the public but it would be particularly good to see new Level 2 students there. Come and say hello if you manage to get along.

The Designers Accord | Integrating sustainability into design education

The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders, working together to create positive environmental and social impact.

In October 2009, they convened over 100 progressive individuals from academic and professional institutions all over the world for two days of highly participatory discussion, planning and action around the topic of design education and sustainability. The main activity was small-group brainstorming focused on answering these questions:

• How can we continue to move design education forward?
• How can we create a common language?
• How can we communicate best?
• How can we design a sustainability curriculum?
• How can we update existing design programs?
• How can we turn abstract ideas into concrete actions?
• How can we help students work in more meaningful ways?
• How can we measure success?

The event came up with a toolkit for students and educators to help embed sustainability in to the curriculum.

Find out more about it at The Designers Accord | Integrating sustainability into design education

(Thanks to Louise Valentine for the tip)