fastcodesign:

Only four days left to enter our INNOVATION BY DESIGN contest. Winners will be featured in the October design issue! 

“We want to give innovators and businesses a record of the year’s most intriguing design ideas—and a catalogue of designers to hire. And we want to celebrate those designers whose influence rarely goes appreciated on a large, mainstream platform.”

If you have friends who are designers, spread the word! Here’s how to enter.

This new ultra-simple deck of cards from designer Joe Doucet has simple geometric motifs for minimalists. But the back of each card is marked with a single diagonal line to ensure you don’t inadvertently show your hand.

Check them out

Fab is expanding beyond its virtual digs by opening a physical store. Learn more about its German showroom, and other changes in the works for Fab, here.

Fab.com, the fastest growing e-commerce site on the web, wants to develop original products, and is asking designers and students to submit their ideas. 

Despite Fab’s ongoing success as a third-party retailer, the company is looking to pivot once again, away from the flash sale model and toward developing Fab as a design brand. The ultimate goal, according to co-founder Bradford Shellhammer, is to become “the world’s alternative to Amazon and Wal-Mart.”

The competition will serve as a testing ground for Shellhammer’s ideas about co-creating products with designers. Want to submit your stuff? Have a look at some of Fab’s other previous products.

What If The Keystone XL Pipeline Was A Bike Path?

This tongue-in-cheek proposal would turn the 5,000-mile pipeline into an opportunity for localized development.

Let’s pretend that it’s 2014, and the Keystone XL Pipeline has just been approved, despite protests from millions of Americans. According to a group of landscape architects at SWA Group, the time to start planning for that day is now. “The environment it will create isn’t beautiful, useful, ornecessarily safe. If we’re not thinking about how to make it better for people, that’s a problem,” says SWA principal Kinder Baumgardner. 

So as part of an internal exercise, the SWA Group is imagining how public amenities could be woven into the 5,000-mile stretch of crude oil pipeline.

On the surface, SWA’s proposal is incredibly cynical. A bike path next to an oil pipeline is the environmental equivalent of a bandaid on a mortal wound. 

They imagine families taking summer trips along the path, stopping at oft-overlooked cultural and natural heritage sites and spending much-needed tourist dollars along the way. As a design element, it’d be fairly inexpensive to build. The real point, explains Baumgardner, is to generate development by increasing local tourism.

“There are hundreds of small towns that won’t benefit from the Oil Sands once the Pipeline is built,” he says. “What we’re talking about is an opportunity to make it into an amenity managed at a local scale.”

This map shows the diversity of ecology and climates that exist in the areas through which the pipeline/trail will travel.

Read the full story here.

fastcodesign:

This Helmet With Brake Lights And Turn Signals Lets Bikers Speak The Language Of Cars

Windshields and airbags are just two the of many safety features bicyclists don’t have, unlike their automobile driving comrades. And while there’s nothing designers can really do about those (other than design sexier velomobiles or install bicyclist-friendly airbags into the exterior of cars), a Hungarian designer has created a concept for a bicycle helmet with three safety features that no car would ever come without: a headlight, a taillight, and turning signals.

Read more here.

 

fastcodesign:

Building A Cell Phone That Doesn’t Kill People

he FairPhone is made with fairly mined minerals, built under good labor conditions, and is entirely recyclable—all things your current phone probably isn’t.

Bas van Abel leads an innovative electronics company. But, unlike Apple or Samsung, he’s not particularly interested in the latest voice activation or finger-swiping technology. No. He’s keener to see disruption in the back-end: in the mines producing minerals like tin and tantalum, the factories that make phones, and the systems that recycle them.

Read the full story here!

fastcodesign:

This Soccer Ball Generates Energy While You Play, And You Can Buy It Now

The Soccket is designed to replace kerosene lights in the developing world by converting games to electricity. 

The Soccket, a soccer ball that generates and stores electricity during game play, was born in 2009. The ball was immediately a hit. For every 30 minutes of play, the ball can juice up an LED lamp for three hours, cutting down on toxic kerosene lamp use. Just plug an LED lamp into the light, and voila, free energy.

Uncharted Play has made some changes to the ball since it was first developed. The first iteration could be inflated and deflated, but it didn’t last long. The second ball was really heavy. The third ball wasn’t that heavy, but it was rigid and had a full-size gyroscope inside. The version available on Kickstarter (a standard Soccket and lamp goes for $99) is dense, water-resistant, made with a super light foam, and contains a fist-sized gyroscope.

“This version is significantly lighter and more efficient in terms of power generation. The only thing we couldn’t replicate in terms of a normal ball is the bounce. It was a tradeoff between wanting it to be hard or light with no bounce,” says Matthews.

In addition to the standard ball, Uncharted Play is offering tricked-out upgrades for backers if it reaches certain stretch goals in the Kickstarter campaign. One version has emergency cell phone charging capability, so users can charge their iPhones instead of a lamp. Another features a revision to the circuit board that tells players how much energy they have generated.

See the full story here.