Only one month is left to prepare and submit applications to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the premier international prize program that awards $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.

Jury
Each year systems thinkers and design pioneers across a wide spectrum of human endeavor are invited from all over the world to be on the Jury and select a winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Past jury members have included Janine Benyus, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Helena Norberg-Hodge, John Thackara, Hazel Henderson, Danny Hillis, Alan Kay, Hunter Lovins, Bill Browning, José Zaglul, William McDonough, Adam Bly, Greg Watson and Vandana Shiva.

Entries
Past entries include visionary strategies from a radical solution to human transportation in the world’s largest cities to a strategy to dramatically increase crop yields and economic development in remote African villages. While the entries cover a broad range of topics, the common thread among them is a highly integrated approach to design — one that is simultaneously comprehensive, anticipatory and aligned with nature’s fundamental principles. This focus on an integrated design strategy is what distinguishes the Challenge and the innovators who have submitted their work from other prize programs.

The deadline for entries is 5pm (Eastern Standard Time) on Monday, October 4, 2010. For the call for entries, instructions for how to enter, reference materials, and much more, visit http://challenge.bfi.org

It is probably no wonder that it is the Dutch who professionalize the idea to use water for living space. Caused by the fact that harbors like the one in Rotterdam are being expanded into the open sea, the old harbours lose their former function and open space for different use. And as space is rare in a country that has been costly recaptured from the sea, alternative ways of using space are welcome.

The company DeltaSync created this Geodesic Dome (Picture © DeltaSync) to create a swimming space on the docklands in Rotterdam. More information about the project on Metropolis Magazine.

Patrick Martinez sent me his interesting idea about how to keep the good old light bulb alive. Of course the only way is to virtualize it. So he did and produced Blank Bubble a downloadable version of a light bulb that even changes colour in the way you conduct it. It is possible to even hide the light bulb when you only want to have the light itself.

His aesthetic design invites to sit around the computer screen with friends and talk about the good old days of the light bulb.

Who ever is interested in design in its experimental aspects and does not have many plans for the next week should try to catch a flight to Lisbon, where tomorrow the EXD’09 starts off with the opening week. The wider subject is “time” – “focusing primarily on the flows and mechanisms of acceleration and fragmentation”, as the organizers put it. The opening week offers a wide mix of events: talks, conferences, exhibitions and of course space for meeting and partying in warm Portuguese nights.

Memorial Torch with Afterlife Cell / © Auger-Loizeau

Interesting people will show up in the first week: e. g. Paola Antonelli, curator from the New York MoMA, will host an open talk about new forms of design. There will be more handcrafty designers and legends like Konstantin Grcic and Giulio Cappellini and also very experimental creatives like James Auger from the Royal College of Arts who will be talking about the exhibition “Lapse in Time” he is participating in. For programme details, the EXD’09 site will try to enlighten you.

If you cannot leave your base straight away, but still want to visit experimentadesign this year – don’t worry: The event goes from September 9th till November 8th.

The Golden Institute for Energy in Colorado was the premier research and development facility for energy technologies in an alternate reality where Jimmy Carter had defeated Ronald Reagan in the US election of 1981. Equipped with virtually unlimited funding to make the United States the most energy-rich nation on the planet, its scientific and technical advancements were rapid and often groundbreaking.

Its scope ranged from planetary engineering to the enabling of individual participation and profit from the creation of electricity. Notable projects include the development of the state of Nevada into a weather experimentation zone and the new gold rush in the form of lightning-harvesters that followed, or major modifications made to the national infrastructure in an attempt to use freeways as a power plants. The institute’s vision continues to inform the American consciousness to this day. In relation to energy preservation and harnessing, but also in terms of man’s relationship to the forces of nature.

Sascha Pohflepp – The Golden Institute from Plugimi on Vimeo.

Picture Credit: Andrew Friend

One of the main topics in the debate about climate change is how to reduce carbon emmissions. That of course raises the question what the individual has to do to save the planet. How far do we have to go in that regard? Do we have to change our lifestyle to the extreme?

This question stands behind the short film APNEA made by Andrew Friend who is studying at Design Interactions at RCA. Friend puts the lens on individual enthusiasts that try to reduce their personal carbon footprint.  “Individuals engage in free-diving at home (facilitated by advances in synthetic biology) in an attempt to drop their basal metabolic rate, subsequently leading to a reduction in bodily CO2 emissions.”

When it comes to the point, the final scene might be a bit too short to understand without reading the footnotes. But still a very poetic approach to the question about the individual dedication to climate change.

How far would you go?

Apnea from andrew friend on Vimeo.

Here’s a picture for the weekend: What if oil prices rise again and we just cannot afford to drive our cars anymore? What would we do with our streets? Here’s the answer…  (Photo credit: Logan5 at Pixdaus)

The discontent cumulated, when the institution’s
provost was dismissed abruptly in late December – the popular Joseph W. Westphal only served three months. The president of The New School, Bob Kerrey thereupon anounced that he would fill the office on a temporary basis himself.

Students of the The New School in New York City were so outraged that they occupied a faculty building in 12th street in Greenwich Village for 30 hours to give their opinion a voice: “Our ability to do the very thing we came here to do — receive a quality education — is at risk,” is written on the protest homepage The New School in Exile. Target of their unconvinience are president Bob Kerrey and James Murtha, his executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Students demand the resignation of both for the following reasons (taken from the online petition):

- It is unacceptable for President Kerrey to appoint himself interim Provost.
- Students face a serious lack of resources, both technological and academic directly due to Kerrey’s leadership.
- Bob Kerrey has attempted to make the New School a profit making venture. Mr. President: Where is the money?
- There is a fundamental lack of democratic transparency concerning both the activities of Bob Kerrey and the board of trustees.

Students stand for reforms of The New School: they want a change towards a critical education and a social responsibility:

As students we have an obligation, because of our privilege, to push the envelope and construct a new vision of how the world could be. Formerly our school was driven by calls for open deliberation, anti-authoritarianism and critical and direct engagement with social problems. Now—under the present leadership—decision-making is secretive and closed. Power is consolidated, abused and wielded as a weapon against academic inquiry and critical skepticism. Our “brand” is now more important than our ethics, and students have been reduced to economic units—like cogs in a corporate machine.

The students announced 1 April as deadline for Kerrey and Murtha to resign. ROGER wishes the students good luck for getting the chance to actively reform their university and design their own and upcoming generations’ educational future.

Jump in the ring, box your way to a personal fluid form and become your own designer.

Whilst the Swedish designers of FRONT playfully draw their furnitures into the air to afterwards 3D-print it, Hannes Walter, Stephan Williams and Andreas Jaritz of FLUID FORMS enter the next level: Here the customer has the chance to completely design his own products via an online interface. In store are objects like the Pin Stripe Bowl or a pepper mill called MY SERENE. The designers:

“Mass products and boring browsing through catalogs are a thing of the past. A sophisticated software and 3D printer turn consumers into ‘powerful’ designers of individual products with just a few mouse clicks.”

Virtual boxing gloves form the lamp. The interface is powered by Fluid Forms' software FORMATORY

The latest development of Fluid Forms is CASSIUS – a DYO (design your own) lamp. With CASSIUS, original lights for one’s own living room are punched out of a virtual block. 3D printers then transform the virtual draft layer by layer into an exclusive object – delivery takes 3 weeks worldwide.

Fluid Form demonstrates that the forecasts of trend and future researches were right: after web 2.0 or 3.0 with all the do-it-yourself-publishing, we are entering an age, where layman can also design and style physical artefacts.

So do we still need designers in the future? Of course we do – services like the one Fluid Form offers need a lot of design work and I’m sure not everyone has got time, talent and interest in designing her or his own, t-shirt, lampshade, butter dish or toaster. What we see here is not an ersatz of professional design work, but rather an other step towards customized and individualized mass products.