An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 14 February 2012

 

As mentioned last week, the 2012 Design Indaba is taking place at the end of this month in sunny Cape Town. One of the highlights for us every year is the Most Beautiful Object in South Africa Award (MBOISA). This year's finalists are great but one design which caught our attention is the Consol Solar Jar by Ockert van Heerden and John Bexley. For those of you not familiar with Consol, they are probably the biggest glassware manufacturer in South Africa. The Solar Jar is really quite clever because it uses an off the shelf 1 liter preserve jar, the kind of jar you keep home made jam in. The lid however has been modified and has a solar panel on the outside with lights and a battery inside. Pretty clever design that uses what exists, we hope it will get the MBOISA award. 

Tasos Calantzis, Terrestrials' CEO (middle row, fourth from the left), will be involved in this years Core77 Design Awards (C7712DA). Tasos will use his experience as a member of the Arivi team, CEO of Terrestrial and Fabrication Africa to be the jury captain for the Social Impact category. C7712DA should be even better than the 2011 inaugural competition.

Scott Berken, who knows a lot about ideas and how they work has shared his list of The 5 best books on Innovation EVER. The list is diverse and as Scott writes, “Most of these books are old. Well guess what? Innovation and creativity are old too.” One book stands out in particular, Dear Theo, By Vincent Van Gogh (& Irving Stone), because Van Gogh embodied passion, something every entrepreneur can relate to. 

Fuel Your Product Design has a great collection of Icons of European Design ranging form classic footage of Dieter Rams and Vernor Panton (above) to Joe Columbo. Great way to spend a bit of time on Valentines day.