Industrial Design Winners Announced

prostoalex writes "Every year Industrial Design Excellence Awards try to pick the products, whose usability, interface and design qualities are unmatched by rivals. 130 winners are announced in 12 distinct categories. Of special interest are Computer Equipment (congratulations, Samsung, Apple, Logitech and HP) and Consumer Products (Apple, Nokia and others)." (Earlier this month, we posted about Apple's selection of winners; there are quite a few others worth looking at, though.)

Comments

Check out the circular printer in design explor

[uiil]

link is here:
URL:http://www.idsa.org/idea/idea2004/g257. htm

very nonstandard solution

Apple Needs to Loose

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be more impressed with Apple if they'd lose a few of these design competitions by listening to the rest of us. OS X is arguably the best OS in existence today. But it's married to the most user-hostile hardware on the planet.

Apple markets to narrow niches. The eMac, ugly and bulky, is great for schools worried about theft. The iMac, impossible to upgrade, is fine for those with tiny apartments and limited needs (an iPod accessory). The iBooks are a good deal for those who want a small laptop. The other laptops are little more than metallic fashion statements. And finally their desktops, oversized, overpriced, overfeatured, and unnecessairly quiet, are for the few who edit audio and video professionally and can afford to pay twice what a comparable PC would cost.

So why aren't the people who said they were making a computer "for the rest of us," making a computer that the rest of us might want to buy? Look at computer sales. What most people want is an inexpensive, expandable desktop that lets them choose the monitor or monitors and add cards to their hearts content. They want to be able to make choices not follows the dictates of Steve Jobs.

Fashion statements are for clothes and jewelry. Computers are a tool and need to be designed and built as such. Apple should listen more to the people who are, would be or were their customers.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

No usability here

[RZeno]

While I always enjoy the IDSA awards, these are not awards that consider usability. These products are evaluated by simply having the judges examine the products and what the product creators say about how the products were made. To judge usability, you actually have to evaluate the product as used by the target audience. The judges do not do this, nor are the product creators required to.

Re:Example

[Saeger]

Green "Cradle to Cradle" manufacturing will only really become viable with the kind of molecular manufacturing methods that mimick nature's bottom-up life-cycle. Once an object is no longer useful (and nobody wants to reuse it) we can spend some stored solar energy to disassemble it (if not exothermic) on a molecular scale for 100% recyclability (since atoms don't get "used up").

Despite all the eco-crying, we'll be stuck with nasty top-down bulk-tech for a couple more years simply because it's cheaper for corps to externalize the environmental costs (esp. in 3rd world countries). With molecular nanotech, it's cheaper to be clean.

--

Hilarious Nike Golf Tees, Again

[PunkXRock]

I've said it before, but I'll say it again (hey, if we're gonna have reposts of articles, why not of comments?)

On the site, in the Design Explorations area, you'll find these Nike golf tees. They look cool, and maybe they even have some good ideas (though if the ground is too frozen to drive a tee in, maybe it's not yet golf-season). But the quote about the "Mojo" tee is just frickin' priceless:

"'The Mojo' tee has a liquid center brewed from turf from Scotland, sand from Pebble Beach, tears from the Nike Goddess and sweat from Tiger Woods."

Yeah...

Re:not exactly

[_Sharp'r_]

It's generally about control.

Either giving up control to Apple to set everything for you and hoping they didn't screw something up or leave out anything you wanted, or about being willing to live with worse original choices in your hardware(assuming you aren't designing all your new systems from parts, like some of us do), but having the control to make sure the parts that are important to you personally can be done just the way you want because of the options available.

Like anything else, it's a trade-off.