Enter Social Designer’s Colored Pencil Contest
Who doesn’t need extra money? Social Designer runs endless contests with good prizes – mostly cash and mostly about $2,000. Now that I’ve got dollar signs spinning in your eyes, this contest isn’t a cash prize. But it worth $660. Enough with the teasing, the prize is a set of professional colored pencils worth $660 (as I said).
Your mission: Design a graphic for an e-card that greets the recipient with colorful cheer. Your design could be an illustration of some kind or a photo you took but it must be original. The winning e-card design will be available on the 500 Colored Pencils website, where you’ll be able to mail to any of your contacts.
For each e-card sent Social Designer will donate 10 cents (up to $1000) to The Humane Society http://www.hsus.org/. The theme of the card should be generic and not reference specific occasions or holidays so it can be tailored by the user with their own personal message to the recipient.
This is a Facebook contest, something new to Social Designer. To learn more, follow this link.
Electrolux Design Lab Winners
Electrolux has announced the winners of this year’s Design Lab Competition. The challenge asked industrial design students from around the world to send in their home appliance designs for the next 90 years (Electrolux is celebrating their 90th anniversary).
Here are this year’s winning designs.
Grand Prize: Cocoon Meat & Fish Cooker
Cocoon is a conceptual cooker designed by Rickard Hederstierna from Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden. It uses radio frequency identification (RFID) signals to identify muscle cells in meat and fish dishes and suggests cooking times. The idea is to “use science to create food, thereby decreasing the burden on the planet by reducing the need for intensive fishing and farming.”¬† The concept is to ‚Äúgrow‚Äù meat and fish from pre-packaged sachets, like making popcorn in a microwave. So you don’t actually catch the fish or raise the cow. Well, it looks cool, but I can’t stop thinking of Soylent Green.
Here are the other finalists.
Teleport Fridge
Beam me up, Scotty! Designed by Dulyawat Wongnawa, from  Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, The Teleport Fridge simply takes your order for food and teleports it directly to you, nice and fresh. It reverses the process by taking the leftovers and transporting them to the recycling center. I need this right now.
Flying In The Rain
From China, student Penghao Shan, Zhejiang, from Sci-tech University, comes a device that uses flying balls to catch rain water, purifies it and delivers it to the drinker. The homing tray also reads fingerprints to determine what additives should be added to the water to ensure the drinker optimizes his or her health.
Mol?©culaire
This concept was a little difficult for my tiny brain to understand. It’s a 3D molecular food printer. Designer, Nico Kl?ɬ§ber, from the K?Éln International School of Design, Germany, was influenced by chefs who scientifically experiment with food and food to create fresh ideas. The Mol?©culaire simplifies the cooking process and acts as a computer numerical control (CNC) food printer. It autonomously prepares basic and otherwise difficult-to-create two and three dimensional parts of meals. It works with a layer-by-layer printing process using small particles from diverse ingredients. This provides simplicity, accuracy, repeatability and, of course, great tasting food! Anyone who can explain this to me get a Design Hole T shirt.
