An Illustrated Weekly of World Design, 03 August 2010

The electric vehicle charging station from frogdesign and ECOtality, called Blink, is another new EV related design, seems every week there is more concepts being made public. But the big news this week is the announcement of Porche’s 818 Spyder concept, a hybrid vehicle that not only looks amazing but accelerates from 0 to 62mph (that’s 100kmh for the rest of us) in 3.2 seconds. If you haven’t already signed up for one, don’t bank on driving the $650 000 Spyder in the near future, Porsche put a 1,000-buyer threshold on the new car, and most of those are already reserved. Image: Motor Authority. 

For all of you who have trawled through patent sites and ended up going through endless drawings this invention by german artists Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus takes it a step further. The 'Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus' is a machine that draws a never-ending string of patent drawings into an illustrative narrative. 

The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. Via designboom, images: Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus.

Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

OpenIDEO, a platform for social innovation projects from IDEO was launched yesterday with 2 challenges open so far. The first one is for Jamie Oliver, this years’ TED prize winner. The goal is to find ways to inspire and educate people (especially kids) to cook and eat healthier food. The other current challenge is for Gray Matters Capital and is to do with low cost educational tools for the developing world. OpenIDEO is a crowdsourcing venture that hopes to attract both young designers and just about everybody else to tackle significant global challenges. See how it works and sign up, there are tons of useful resources already on the site. (for newsletter-Image: Meena Kadri.)

Bill Moggridge co-founder of the design firm IDEO and now director of Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is Core77’s latest columnist. His first article Design Thinking: Dear Don... is a response to Don Norman’s post; Design Thinking: A Useful Myth? From the article; ‘The "Design Thinking" label is not a myth. It is a description of the application of well-tried design process to new challenges and opportunities, used by people from both design and non-design backgrounds. I welcome the recognition of the term and hope that its use continues to expand and be more universally understood, so that eventually every leader knows how to use design and design thinking for innovation and better results.’ Good to compare both thought leaders opposing points of view. 

Tasos will be a judge at the SABS Design Excellence Awards 2010, the award scheme was first established in 1969 and for more than 40 years the scheme has recognized the achievements of South African product designers, encouraged local product designing, manufacturing and promoted the international competitiveness of local products.