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. 

In the developing world, good design means more than just a pretty object, it has more constraints and a higher barrier to user acceptance. So when Michael O’Brien from Sydney’s University of Technology designed a low cost LED surgical lamp, he got our attention. The design not only takes into consideration the lack of reliable power, O’Brien also took into consideration the distribution model by making sure the device could ship flat and be assembled with very little expertise. Great example of appropriate design. 

It is that time of the year again, Design Indaba 2012 is starting at the end of February. This year looks like it will be another successful showcase of international speakers, great design and new events such as Common Pitch. Common Pitch is all about using creativity to develop solutions for some of the challenges the world faces today. Finalists will pitch their ideas and stand a chance to win funding to realize their dreams. If you are thinking of spending warm days filled with design in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Design Indaba is the place to go. Via Cape Town 2014. 

We are going to reiterate our love for LEGO, for it has proved to be a useful prototyping tool and has our children playing for hours. It is great for us to see the cool offices where LEGOs designers get to work. The offices are full of LEGO creations and the library of parts is something that every kid would love. Complete with the creative space slide, the environment allows people to share ideas and become part of a collaborative culture. While IDEO and Google have a similar approach to this type of office, isn’t it time you thought about fostering creativity in your workplace? Via Dezeen, image; Anders Sune Berg.

With only 177 days left to enter the 2012 James Dyson Award, students, both prensent and past have a huge opportunity to get noticed. If you think you can “design something that solves a problem” and could use ten thousand quid, get designing. Image: The Airdrop, the winning entry of last year's Dyson Award.

As you'll remember from a few weeks back, we have secured some funds to start developing the life-saving Arivi stove. As from next year we will be working on setting up supply chains and new distribution models to deliver safer paraffin stoves to thousands of South African households.   

The Sphero is one of those toys that we would love to have in the studio, it looks a bit like a large golf ball but inside the cute exterior lurks some serious technology. The Sphero is controlled by your smartphone and is capable of whizzing around with various apps and even has a camera built in. The big idea behind the high-tech toy is the open platform that Orbotix, the company behind Sphero, has created, which allows third party developers to make their own games and tools. Lesson learned from Sphero? Make something cool and make it accessible for others which in turn makes more people buy the $130 toy.

In the future we might see robots building not just cars and gadget but entire buildings. Architects Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea have an interesting installation coming up next month in France where flying robots will assemble a six meter tower using 1500 polystyrene foam bricks that give us a glimpse into the future of construction. Via Dezeen.  

This edition is our last An Illustrated Weekly of World Design for this year and we hope it has informed and inspired you with it's tales of design and innovation. We will be taking a break until January - here's lookng forward to a 2012 that's full of design inspiration.

Design Thinking is the term used to describe human centered design processes and Wired UK has reported on an interesting case of design thinking being used to minimize violence in accident and emergency departments in NHS hospitals. In this year long project, run by the Design Council along with design agency PearssonLloyd, two approaches were developed. The first is the creation of a better experience for the patient. The second part is to help staff manage stressful situations and proactively respond with possible solutions. The design thinking approach means a relatively inexpensive range of solutions that save the NHS millions of pounds a year and improve both the patient and staff experience.

UK architectural giant, Foster and Partners do some great projects, and the latest one is the McLaren Production Center. The new facility will produce MP4-12C high-performance sports cars in a linear production line that looks very clinical, efficient and modern. Great looking cars in a well designed space.

Infographics are a great way to illustrate trends, data and strategy - a good example of this is Pop Chart Lab's newest poster, "The Insanely Great History of Macintosh." Cliff Kuang uses the poster to illustrate the 3 phases of Apple. Within the first phase, with Steve Jobs at the helm, Apple focused on 2 products: the Macintosh and the Apple II. Then came the period where Jobs was not controlling the company and Apple used the same strategy as other companies such as Dell and IBM by increasing the line of products. When Jobs returned to Apple, he once again implemented a 'less is more' product offering. This not only cut down production costs, but more importantly reduced customer confusion. Job’s “stop all the crap” approach remains a good one to deliver excellent products and services. 

Although steampunk as a fashion trend might be fading away, steampunk inspired inventions and designs will never die. Matt Armstrong has brought his version of steampunk inspired design to LEGO brick sculptures by creating typewriters, weapons and cameras - see his collection here. Image: all rights reserved by monsterbrick.

The Airdrop is the winning entry of this year's Dyson Award. The design is from an Australian student Edward Linacre of Swinburne University of Technology. Linacre devised the Airdrop as a solution to the severe droughts Australia has encountered due to climate change. It features a solar panel which sits high above the ground and a small turbine which sucks air underground. As the warm air drops in temperature condensation is created due to the cooler temperature underground. The resulting water is stored in a small tank which is then pumped directly to the roots of crops. Linacre went through several iterations before the final prototype was entered, which must have helped him win the vote of James Dyson. 

We are big fans of SABMiller which, originally formed in South Africa, has become one of the most innovative global breweries in the world. Their recent announcement of exploring ways to make beer from cassava is big news in Africa, especially for customers who traditionally prefer home brews. Cassava is a drought resistant root vegetable which is abundant in Africa and SABMiller hopes to employ small scale farmers and to develop mobile processing units in rural areas to utilize this natural resource.

Helen Walters has picked up some great advice from Lorna Ross, the design manager at Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation which lists 20 Ways to Protect and Nurture Design. Key tips include: Move beyond needing to be understood-focus on being valued, pay close attention to feedback and always be seen to value it and value integrity and honesty above everything else. Essentially these are leadership principles for designers but if you want continue to bring design and the thinking processes behind it into the boardroom, pay attention. Image: Marc Koska, Safepoint.

Capetown2014 has a great piece on the recent release of South Africa’s National Planning Commission (NPC), a 444-page report outlining how the goverment believes we should take the country into a brighter, more sustainable future by 2030. The NPC has taken a very user centered approach to illustrate the challenges faced by South Africa, as seen in the video above, and how design can play an important role in realizing the solutions to those challenges.