An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 10 August 2010

The Pure Bottle, by Timothy Whitehead, a design and technology graduate from Loughborough University has won the UK leg of the James Dyson Award. The idea behind Pure, a UV sterilization water bottle is the result of Whitehead’s trip to Zambia where he experienced drinking water that was treated with chlorine and iodine tablets. Pure can sterilize water in 2 minutes using a combination of a 4 micron-sized water filters and a wind-up ultra violet light system to clean the water of 99.9% of its impurities.

No word on cost yet, but a fully functional prototype has been developed and the invention will now go forward to the awards' global final in October. Via Inhabitat, images; James Dyson Award.

Hot on the heels of openIDEO a platform for social innovation projects from IDEO comes frogMob, a crowdsourcing platform for design ethnography from frogdesign. The active Mob is Power. The goal of frogMob is: The methodology and spirit of frogMob lend themselves to open collaboration. frogMob builds on the trend of using social media to run research studies, and the ability of these tools to conduct research remotely. This is where the experiment really begins. We're reaching out beyond frog's global studies and tapping in to our social networks to encourage everyone to join the frogMob. With open collaborative platforms becoming increasingly common the web really has a role in social innovation. 

We mention a lot of EV and hybrid vehicle design here, but we have never talked about HW vehicles before. HW is human waste and the Bio-Bug is a modified Volkswagen Beetle that is being tested in the UK by Wessex Water. It's not a permanent fix for the world's oil dependency problems obviously, but it is a good way for a public utility to run an energy neutral operation while reducing its own fleet's need for gasoline, reducing both carbon emissions and costs to the public at the same time. Image: Fast Company.

Hand-Eye Supply is Core77’s latest venture, a retail store in Portland, Oregon that specializes in shop tools, workwear, design supplies and tchotchkes (which are small toys, gewgaws, knickknacks, baubles, lagniappes, trinkets, or kitsch in case you were wondering). The Flagship Portland store was developed by Core founder Eric Ludlum, lets hope there are more Hand-Eye Supply’s on the way, looks great!

Next week Tasos will be lecturing at the Absa Capital Management Development Programme - on the subject of "Innovation & Entrepreneurship". This module will be taking place on the 16 - 17 August 2010 at GIBS. The ABSA Capital programme is aimed at developing the capability of mid-to-senior level managers to operate with flexibility in successfully managing and leading in diverse and changing situations.